For the love of the B

I'd been meaning to write about the recent release of the new version of Blogger. But fortunately Ev captured pretty much everything I wanted to point out, but didn't mention on Buzz. And then he ripped the face offa evhead.com ... which I'm gonna assume is unrelated.

This release of Blogger will also be the last I work on as I am leaving Google at the end of next week. I'd been planning on leaving for a while but really wanted to see this version in the wild before I went.

There are two questions you get asked when you leave a job: 1) why and 2) what next. I'll take the second part first.

What's next is nothing much. I'm going to travel some ... Vegas, London (yes, that London) and France are due up for the Fall. I'm going to play a bunch of poker (hopefully better than I have been) and a bunch of video games as well. The reading of books (comic or otherwise) will likely be involved, potentially in a beach-like setting. I'm definitely not going to look for or accept another job for several months altho' I anticipate working on the web again.

As to the Why, well, I've been working on Blogger for almost four years and I've been at Google for 3 1/2. I could have taken time off or switched to a different project, but I feel that after I'm finished doing the nothing I've got planned, I'm going to want to do something somewhere small. And, to be honest, I can't really imagine being at Google but not being involved in Blogger.

As Bryan Mason likes to recount, when I interviewed for the job at Pyra he asked me what I wanted to do next and I said "Anything but want I've been doing." Not the best interview answer, but fortuntely Bryan thought that would make me a good fit. Turns out, I couldn't have been luckier.

Early on when I was working on Blogger I realized that there were those who saw blogging as a Great Leap Forward in personal expression and those who saw it as largely self-indulgent nonsense. The thing that surprised me was that I was in the former group.

I struggle with excessive skepticism and in many ways would be a natural blog-hater were it not for the fact that, to me, it's undeniably awesome that people can so easily put their profound, profane, revolutionary and ridiculous thoughts online. To me, this is so obviously the fullest expression of why the web is the most important invention of our lives. To what better use could it be put?

To put it another way, I love facts. Love 'em! Especially about movies. So, when I first saw IMDB I thought I was looking into the mind of God. But I never actually wanted to work on the web until I learned about Blogger.

I feel amazingly privileged to have been able to work on a product that's used by millions of passionate users and to help that product grow to enable more voices to exist. In doing so, I've been able to work with some phenomenal people. I'd like to thank Jason Sutter who successfully campaigned for me to get interviewed at Pyra despite the fact that the requirements for the job were allegedly "Not a dude, and especially not a dude named Jason." I'm incredibly grateful to Evan Williams who hired me, brought me to Google, enabled me to become Blogger's product manager and entrusted me with his creation when he left.

And I thank all of the folks who've worked on Blogger - the folks who worked on it before I was around, the Pyra crew with whom I spent many a day cramped into offices in both San Francisco and Mountain View and the people who built Blogger into what it is today and what it will become.