Arvind Sundararajan

I thought noncompete agreements were already unenforceable in California. What did this decision change? - Tudor Bosman

Hope that stands and expands. I've seen some particularly onerous noncompetes in the radio business: employees making at or near an area's median income -- not even managerial people -- prohibited from working anywhere within 100 miles of their current homes for 6 months to a year. Outrageous. - Chris Baskind

As long as it's not pronounced "cool" - Jim Norris

It depends on the product. Does "originally to describe an elephant gone mad, separated from its herd, running wild and causing devastation" match what you're building? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... - Paul Buchheit

Trying to find a non-descriptive name... Yes, the association to 'amok' is a bit disturbing but testing if that is what comes to mind when you first see it. So a thumbs-down than? - Bindu Reddy

im partial to wellamokutoo.com - Rob Reed

Reminds me of Akamai - Sam Purtill

if you pronounce it in portuguese it would sound something like "ouch! my ass!" (ai! meu cu!) - Leandro Koiti Sato

It doesn't do much for me, but I also sold Apple stock when it hit $44, so I'm probably not the best judge. - Jim Graham

Has a soft non-threatenting Hawaiian coffee drink connotation too. - Michael Muller

try something like avakaya.com in the same spirit of ooyala.com by some other ex-googlers :) - Krishna Gade

My first thought was "amok you", which sounds decidedly unfriendly. - Laurence Gonsalves

Is this like single-bit twitter? "Am ok, you?" If it's something like that, once I get the association, it is memorable. - Neil Kandalgaonkar

Initial gut reaction: "meh". Feels like you spun the wheel of five-letter-words still available as domain names and this one came up. I don't really like that it isn't obvious how to pronounce it. Hard to pronounce can mean hard to remember. - Dylan Parker

Hmm, I like the idea of single-bit twitter. Why not 1-bit ff? At any time, you can add an item to your feed. All items are 1 bit, Like/NotLike. Just like in the real ff, friends can comment, again with just Like or NotLike. - j1m

1 - ⓞnor

0 - j1m

Sounds good to me. Do you think the people on FF would have given a thumbs up to ebay or a misspelled number? :) - Chris White

http://www.maplandia.com/ghana... - Jutta Degener

It's ukoma, but backwards. Hmm. - Adam Lasnik

nay !! - James Ramya Rajan J

Amoku means "smelly toenails" in Vietnamese. - Ken Norton

test - say it to 4 friends over the phone. how many type it in correctly? - peter

Thanks to everyone for their responses... Clearly we are not going to pick Amoku now :). - Bindu Reddy

whats the product suite or is it in stealth mode ? - Peter Dawson

It sounds like "Amok Time" the episode of Star Trek where Spoke goes through Pon Far, the Vulcan mating season. - Kevin Shannon

You don't like PSP? - Gabe

Somehow mixing Python indentation rules with HTML wasn't very appealing :) - Arvind Sundararajan

No love for mako? - Alex Mendes da Costa

I see your point. My code is littered with #endifs and #endfors. But otherwise it would be littered with closing braces, so it's really just a problem that it can be tricky to debug with an #end is missing. - Gabe

FWIW, we've been pretty happy with django/jquery as our stack - Carl Sjogreen

Oh, and BTW, what didn't you like about the planet? - Carl Sjogreen

Thank goodness! Enough people were twittering about it ;-) - Carla Lynne Hall

that didn't take long - Jeff Douglass

Wait, they went through all of this agony, and all they had to do was change their name? It can't be that simple... - Josh Bancroft

Sounds like Words Crapper :) - Andrew Wooldridge

@Andrew Wooldridge LOL! That brightened up my day! - Charlie Hope via twhirl

hm? I just assumed you meant a new blog post. Do you mean a whole new blog site? Now I'm even more curious. - Lise

Type in any search query e.g. Sergey Brin - http://tinyurl.com/5skbqw. You will see "Business People in Software" as one of the categories. Open up the category box and you will see [David Filo] listed. Now go to David Filo's page on Wikipedia and at the bottom you will see the category - "Business People in Software" as one of the categories [it is near the bottom of the entry]. You can trace every category back to Wikipedia this way. - Bindu Reddy

It is pretty clever actually... They got their ontology from Wikipedia: Nodes and Categories and than they tagged each of the pages on with the Nodes that appear on the page. When they run a query, they compute a dynamic histogram of the nodes in the result set to get the final category structure. Now this works most of the time. However, it fails when the result page is somewhat less relevant to the query.. For example: The query Obama sometimes returns "Hispanic American Politicians".... - Bindu Reddy

I was wondering how long it would take for people to figure this out. :) The first non-Google person that noticed was the Google OS blog, which said "Another interesting idea is the explorative category section that shows related Wikipedia categories and topics." I wrote a personal blog post about how Cuil generates their categories and then decided not to hit the publish button. - Matt Cutts

Very interesting, especially since Wikipedia is very weakly structured (wouldn't dare to call it an ontology). Would be interesting if they chose Freebase or dbpedia to drive the related information bits. - Deepak

Awesome, good luck :) - Hao Chen

Congrats and best wishes!!! - Kevin Fox

Congratulations, good luck! - Tudor Bosman

Good luck! - Erica Baker

post your idea to FF; you get great feedback quickly - peter

Good Luck! - Vivek Sundaram

Thanks for the wishes... @peter, not sure the idea matters as long as you pick a big and interesting space. We are kicking around a couple right now but no matter what we pick, I am sure there is someone somewhere already doing it :)) I think the devil is all in the details and execution... esp. when it comes to consumer start-ups. - Bindu Reddy

sure you still get great feedback from the friendfeed crowd. see my post on the greeting cards idea; great quality feedback and fast! - peter

Good luck!!! Very curious to see what you come up with. I am sure you got the better desk :) - Deepak

They just don't want to burn any bridges. What's so hard to understand about that? - Alex Mendes da Costa

When people look for a new job, they can expect to be Googled. Most prospective employers find it unappealing when they see a candidate bash their previous employer. Of course, it might also be that they had one of the best experiences of their lives and are eager to strike out on their own. This is actually the case for a lot of people leaving Google (especially those who tend to have high-traffic personal blogs). - Kevin Fox

Bindu, I'm curious if you're including my recent post as an example of an ex-Googler's goodbye that is "garden-variety" and "scared of speaking out?" I agree with Kevin that it seems that many people who both a) leave voluntarily and b) want to talk about their change in employment are also likely to be people whose experiences were mostly positive. This includes me. - Chris Wetherell

It might just be that people don't see the need to comment on the bad as their lives have now moved past that. - Edward Ho

For some, leaving is like graduating from college. After 4 years, you do something else. - amar

The question is not why googlers don't (necessarily) have an ax to grind when they leave... it's why so many people stay so long in places where they do have bitter terrible experiences. - Clare Dibble

Firstly Chris, no this was not directed at you or anyone in particular. This was just a random discussion we were having yesterday :) I am also not suggesting anyone at Google has had a terrible experience. In fact, I do believe most people have good experiences.... However, I do believe every experience has both pros and cons. In Google's case - many more pros than cons... All we were wondering is how could it be that we never hear a con... - Bindu Reddy

Like with any venture, there were often frustrating times, bad decisions, and lame people. But, the company and the leadership were so head and shoulders above anything I have experienced elsewhere in terms of their dedication to users, ethical compass, and empowerment of young, inexperienced employees, that I feel a deep loyalty and gratitude for working there. Did they get everything right? No way. Is it getting worse? Yes. But I will always feel lucky to have worked there. - Christopher Sacca

I also have to say, I agree with Kevin's comment that high-traffic bloggers are likely to have had good experiences. Since these people tend to be more influential than others, constructive criticism from them can sometimes make Google better... There is always room for improvement ;) - Bindu Reddy

Less so now, but it seems that those that were there near the beginning-ish were part of something that is being immortalized in American pop culture. Kind of like happening into Jack Keroak as a drinking buddy. You had a sense you were part of something exciting and important. Except instead of being stranded in Denver without your clothes or your girl or whatever, you made money out of the experience as well. - Clare Dibble

Why are high-traffic bloggers likely to have had a good experience? - Gary Burd

@Gary: This was my reasoning, may or may not be the same as Kevin's. If you have a high-traffic blog, it is most probably because you are well-known in the blogosphere for having launched/designed/run a fairly successful/well-known product(s). All said and done and in-spite of all the frustrations, launching/running a successful product can be a very rewarding experience at Google. So that leads to the conclusion, that most high-traffic bloggers have had a pretty good experience :) - Bindu Reddy

@Chris White: No doubt there are a lot of people from Google who are influential that are not bloggers. In fact the vast majority of influential people at Google don't blog.. That said, Googlers with high traffic blogs tend to be more influential than your average Googler. - Bindu Reddy

I would also add item #6: "Everyone I worked with is a super duper genius, and the person replacing me is super duper genius-er".....again, not to say it isn't true, just seems to be included in all the goodbye posts. - Adam Kazwell

Thanks to all of you for helping us get here! We are excited to open it up and move on to some big features we have planned :) - Bret Taylor

Congrats! Looking forward to the big new features. - David Vasileff

Awesome news! - Sage LaTorra

Love it! - Ross Miller

Congratulations, guys! ^_^ - Jess Lee

Congratulations, I'm spending more and more time trawling FF, there's always something new here - Glenn Slaven

Congratulations! - Christopher Black

Congratualtions! 축하합니다. 더욱 더 발전하세요. - zizukabi

! - j1m

Congrats! - Bindu Reddy

Yay friendfeed! I'm so excited for what's to come, although I'd still love the site even if it stayed the same - Emily Miller

Congrats from Belgium too! - Maarten Somers