It has already been four years and eight months since I started working at my current company.

I joined the company with the ambition of making the entire portal site social, and the projects I worked on allowed me to gain experiences that would be hard to come by at other companies, such as sharing profiles and social graphs across services and implementing Japan's first OpenSocial container for PCs. During that time, I also worked as a developer evangelist, serving as an OpenSocial Google API Expert and managing the community, becoming a committer for Shindig, and managing SocialWeb Japan. Those were truly social web crazy years.

Meanwhile, in Japan, huge sites like mixi, Mobage, GREE, and Yahoo! have been adding social app support one after another since last year, creating a market and creating a gold rush. Overseas, Facebook Connect, OpenID Connect, Distributed SocialWeb, and other technologies are steadily moving towards the next step in the social web.

When I thought about my future direction, I began to have doubts about whether I could do what I really wanted to do in my current position, and whether I could do work that would have an impact on society. That's when I received this offer.

I will be moving to Google on June 1st.

** **My position is Developer Advocate, a so-called evangelist. I will be promoting Chrome and HTML5 technologies.

People around me always ask me, "Why Google? Why not the social web team?" So, for future reference, I've summarized the reasons here.

  • Google has been vigorously promoting the opening up and standardization of the Internet, including OpenSocial.
  • My experience working as a Google API Expert convinced me of its appeal.
  • As it is an international company, I thought I would be able to deal with developers from all over the world and gain experience.
  • I found it exciting to be able to take the lead in educating people about HTML5 and browsers, fundamental technologies that everyone involved with the Internet should know.
  • Browsers and social media will become inseparable in the future. I thought I could play a part in that movement.
  • I was approved to work on the social web within the 20% rule.

There are countless other detailed reasons, but these are the main ones. I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to choose the option that is literally the best one for me right now.

The future of the management community #

I'd like to briefly touch on the communities I've run so far.

As for SocialWeb Japan, I would like to continue running it myself for as long as possible. We have only held five study sessions so far, but the topics I want to cover are piling up every day, so I am keeping an eye on it. (We are continually recruiting staff. If you are interested, please contact us.)

Regarding Google Buzz API Japan, I would like to hold a Hackathon or something, but I'm not sure if I will have the time, so I'll have to wait and see for a while.

Naturally, I will be graduating from the OpenSocial API Expert position. I'm planning to recommend another excellent person instead, so if you're wondering if it might be me, please look forward to it :)

Many of you may not know this, but I intend to continue the English learning community for developers, EIGOBU, for my own sake as well.

lastly #

I would like to thank everyone on my previous team who has put up with my activities and whims, and my family who has supported me.

In particular, my wife and I became engaged when I was working part-time as a professional composer, and even after I entered the web world and got a job, we overcame many twists and turns together, such as company acquisitions and job changes, and she believed in and supported me until I reached the milestone of moving to Google while raising our children.

I still don't know what the future holds, but I'm really looking forward to working at Google, and I'm sure this will be the biggest turning point in my life.

I hope to continue contributing to making the Japanese web better in the future.

Hideshi Kitamura