My peers fell all over themselves to cover the tweet that del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter is joining Google after leaving Yahoo in June. Schachter confirmed the news. Read the blitz of briefs on TechMeme here.
What’s the surprise that a talented programmer left Yahoo for another Web services power in Silicon Valley? Criminy! Stop the presses. This story won’t stop until Yahoo’s bought or buried. Yahoo has a lot of talent, still, though not as much as it used to.
The company is a leaderless mess, with some soldiers like Schachter going to Google and others like search guru Qi Lu going to Microsoft. Some are even going to Facebook and its Hollywood rival MySpace.
It must be nice to not work since June and join Google to work on some project or another — and that’s what’s interesting about this news bulletin. We don’t know what Schachter will be doing for Google.
Will Schachter head Google’s take on a del.icio.us-like bookmarking service? I could see something like this playing well with Google Reader. Google already tried and failed to buy Digg, so maybe it’s hiring guys with the chops to create these social Web services.
Or maybe Schachter will just get plugged into OpenSocial to join Kevin Marks, David Glazer, Joe Kraus and other guys plotting out the social graph for the world with big buzzwords like activity streams.
The funny thing is, we may never know what impact Schachter has at Google. The company is big enough (more than 20,000 employees) these days to where star employees tend to get lost in the shuffle.
Who knew who Andy Rubin or Ben Goodger were until Android and Chrome, respectively, popped up in 2008? And whatever happened to Ben Ling going back to Google from Facebook?
What do you think Schachter will be doing for Google?