San Francisco — The Google-to-Facebook talent shift has taken a new dimension: Mountain View, Calif., search engine leader Google’s Engineering Director Matthew Papakipos, best known for leading the Chrome OS project to reshape browsers and the Web into a more powerful foundation for applications, recently tweeted, “Now that Chrome OS & WebGL are in good shape, it is time for something new. I’m going to work @ Facebook! Love the product and team. Woot!”, thus ending his just over three years at Google where he had a pretty impressive array of responsibilities.
Papakipos joined Google in 2007, after the Mountain View-based company acquired software development company PeakStream, where he was the CTO and Vice President of Engineering. His tweet can be read about the shift for yourself below. It actually makes the situation sound almost positive for Google, in a the-real-work-is-done-and-now-I-want-another-challenge sense.
Google and Facebook have formally corroborated on their respective parts the departure and arrival of Papakipos. However, Facebook has not disclosed what exactly Papakipos will be doing. A representative for the company did say that Papakipos will be a key player on the engineering team.
According to his LinkedIn profile (which has not been upgraded yet with the news), he:
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Started and managed the Chrome OS project.
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Manage Chrome user interface team.
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Managed Chrome HTML5 apis.
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Started and manage GPU-accelerated 3d APIs for Chrome: O3D, WebGL, etc.
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Started the NativeClient project: Native C++ code for web apps.
Regardless of how much sound the first version of Chrome turns out to be, it is hard to imagine that Google would not prefer to keep Papakipos around. And what he is going to perform at Facebook is anyone’s guess. His background is in web graphics programming which should fit well with the Social Networking site as it strives to become more interactive and available on more devices.
Facebook stated:
“Matthew Papakipos has surely joined Facebook. Papakipos is a brilliant entrepreneur and engineer, and it is admirable that he has decided to bring his considerable expertise to Facebook’s foremost engineering team.”
Google, on the other hand, has indicated that the departure of Papakipos will not affect the development of Chrome OS. The company explains:
“Matt made great contributions to Google and Chrome OS, and we are sure he will do the same in his next endeavors. We wish him the best. We have a deep pool of talent and are very excited about the launch of Chrome OS devices later this year.”
This indicates that he should be a valuable asset for Facebook, anyway. But the timing is strange however, with Google’s ChromeOS barely months away.
Papakipos, an engineering director, formed PeakStream before it was purchased by Google, and earlier to that he also worked at Nvidia, and further still, earned a degree from Brown. Among the projects Papakipos has achieved are: the Chrome browser, the Chrome OS browser-based operating system, and the WebGL project for building 3D graphics into the Web.
Facebook has been appointing several brilliant individuals from other companies. And surprisingly though, just a few weeks back, the social networking tycoon has managed to snatch former Senior Android Product Manager Erick Tseng from Google. But now it is hard to guess, too, given that Chrome and most of the other stuff Papakipos has worked on over the years is not similar to any known project at the social network.