Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990, and Eazel in 1999. In 2002, he helped Mitch Kapor promote open source software with the Open Source Applications Foundation. Hertzfeld worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, where in 2011 he was the key designer of the Circles user interface in Google+.
It makes me think: I wonder if Google has become the place where famous people go to...not do much. Like, they just sequester geniuses, like so much carbon. Shiny carbon status symbols.
Google did that to a big chunk of the cutting-edge robotics industry. In 2013, they acquired a bunch of robotics companies. Most of them were never heard from again. Ones that had customers, such as Bot and Dolly, were shut down. For several years, many people thought Google had some big secret project in the works. No. They were going nowhere. Now they've sold many of the companies off to Softbank in Japan.
>Ones that had customers, such as Bot and Dolly, were shut down. For several years, many people thought Google had some big secret project in the works.
That works wonders to inflate Google's stock too (on such vague promises of future tech), way beyond they ever spent on them.
>I wonder if Google has become the place where famous people go to...not do much
They don't have to do much. If they just have 1-2 major insights per year, or help teams make the right decisions because of their experience, that's enough to justify millions in salary -- even if they don't write code or project manage themselves but just sit on their office playing Pong and waiting for someone to ask them a question.
Two examples i can think of:
The guy who made Tetris ended up working at Microsoft for the Xbox team, and I think Matz works for Rakuten in Japan? - might just an honorary position.
The Circles interface was good though, it was even adapted in an (IMO inferior) form by Facebook. Its main issue was that it was made for Google+ that nobody wanted to use.
>It's great that the user experience of Google Plus is being so well received, and I'm happy about all the positive feedback that's been coming my way, but I'm worried that I'm getting too much credit for it, so this long-winded post is an attempt to set the record straight.
>I am indeed the main individual behind the interaction design and implementation of the circle editor. I conceived, designed and implemented a compelling prototype for it almost single-handedly, and then wrote a fair percentage of the production javascript code with lots of help from my friends. I also worked on a couple of other parts of the product a little bit, but that's pretty much as far as it goes.
>Steven Levy's excellent Wired article got the story right - I wrote the circle editor and then recently widened my focus to the overall Google Plus user experience. But subsequent stories jumped to the conclusion that I was responsible for the design of the entire product that we launched on Tuesday, which isn't true, but I guess it was just too good a story (about Apple design values infecting Google) for people to resist. And now some people are saying that I'm responsible for the broad visual refresh now rolling out across Google, which couldn't be further from the truth - in fact, I'm not even sure I like it.
>One thing that I learned during the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984 was that the press usually oversimplifies everything, and it can't deal with the reality that there are many people playing critical roles on significant projects. A few people always get too much credit, while most people get too little, that's just the way it has always worked. But luckily, it's 2011 and I can use the service that I helped to create to clarify things.
>+Shaun Modi is the awesome young designer most responsible for the visual design of the circle editor, especially the blooming circles, along with
+Jonathan Terleski, who helped refine it after Shaun departed. +Joseph Smarr also helped with the design quite a bit, and was especially valuable as someone I could rely on (along with Jonathan) to tell me when a particular aspect was good enough yet or not.
>Google probably won't be thrilled about me mentioning the names of the superb developers who helped me with the circle editor code (hello recruiters) but I feel that I must mention my main collaborators here: +Owen Prater +Eric Cattell +Eric W. Barndollar and +Griff Hazen, along with Ariel Gertzenstein and Rich Conlan who helped in the early stages. And those are just the main front-end guys, there are plenty of others who worked on the shared infrastructure or the back-end that I won't mention.
>And all of the above are just the people who helped with the circle editor and related UI. There are plenty of others who worked on the stream, profiles and photos, as well as the leadership, product managers and various specialists who also made invaluable contributions every day. Suffice it to say that Google Plus is the creation of large, talented team that I'm proud to be a part of, and anyway it's only the beginning, we're all excited about what it has a chance to become over the months and years ahead.
Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990, and Eazel in 1999. In 2002, he helped Mitch Kapor promote open source software with the Open Source Applications Foundation. Hertzfeld worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, where in 2011 he was the key designer of the Circles user interface in Google+.