Christopher “Moot” Poole, the founder of infamous image board 4chan, has popped up at one of the most unlikely places, and that place is Google.
Poole said in a blog post he was excited to announce he’d joined Google, before waxing lyrical about how wonderful the company is:
When meeting with current and former Googlers, I continually find myself drawn to their intelligence, passion, and enthusiasm — as well as a universal desire to share it with others. I’m also impressed by Google’s commitment to enabling these same talented people to tackle some of the world’s most interesting and important problems.
I can’t wait to contribute my own experience from a dozen years of building online communities, and to begin the next chapter of my career at such an incredible company.
According to Business Insider Moot will be working under Bradley Horowitz, VP of Google Photos and Streams, but it’s not exactly clear what his position will entail other than the natural conclusion that it will likely involve something around community building (hinted at in his blog post) and sharing.
Poole sold 4chan to Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of 2channel, a Japanese language culture site that not only preceded 4chan but is said to have been the inspiration for 4chan’s creation, in September 2015, after initially announcing that he was stepping down from running the site in the January of the same year.
Changes
How far his role will go is one still missing an equation in the mix, as a member of the Google+ team posted that Moot would be working with them, so there’s an off chance that he could be involved in an attempt to flog the proverbial dead horse that is Google’s third failed attempt at building a social network to take on Facebook.
That would be unlikely, and indeed an unwise waste of talent at that.
What we should see Poole doing is helping Google build communities as addons to Google Photos, itself a spinoff of Google+ and a wildly successful one at that.
Although users are able to share photos from Google Photos currently, most people are using the service to backup photos versus sharing them, but imagine Poole building a community that encouraged sharing of photos along the lines of Imgur.com; 4chan may be regarded unfairly by many to be a cesspool of content but it started as an image sharing board that rapidly grew into a massive community.
Poole is believed to have started working at Google on February 29.
Image credit: remisser/Flickr/CC by 2.0
Duncan Riley
Duncan is a co-founder of VC funded media company B5Media and founder of news site The Inquisitr, and was a senior writer at TechCrunch in its earlier days.
Tips? Press releases? Intersting startup? email: duncan@nichenet.com.au or contact Duncan on Twitter @duncanriley
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