With the addition of Poole, Google+ may see a much needed renaissance, which has been somewhat forgotten since Vic Gundotra left the company in 2014 and left Google+ to Horowitz. Since Gundotra left, we’ve seen Google+ getting split up with Photos being removed and Streams as well. In the meantime, Google+ has struggled to establish itself in a market that’s dominated by Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn since its launch five years ago. At the age of 15, Poole founded 4chan about 12 years ago. Since then, he has built it into a 20 million active user image-sharing community as the most popular web properties in the U.S. and, because of the anonymous nature of the site, its disrepute has grown in kind. However, it was also regularly criticised for offensive and malicious jokes that were most famously seen in the response to the leak of naked pictures of celebrities in 2014. After his success with 4chan, Poole ventured out with a pair of start-ups. But just a few years after failing to win the confidence of investors, the start-ups, Canvas and DrawQuest, were closed down in early 2014. And after moving on from those failed ventures, Poole announced, a year later, that he was leaving his post as 4chan’s administrator. At the time of Poole’s retirement from 4chan, the community had seen more than 42 billion page views and more than 1 billion visitors. Nine months later, 4chan was sold to a Japanese messaging board. With Poole on the team, Google’s social media platforms might very well become the Internet’s next big thing. After all, Poole has done it before, transforming a bare-bones online forum that focused on Japanese anime and its subcultures into a leviathan of a message board that was regarded as a place that is just a few steps away from the Dark Web. As for Poole, he stated that he always liked Google, adding that he is eager to share his expertise and experience to the search giant’s ailing social platform. “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,” he wrote on his blog. Poole was also vowed by Google’s support in empowering its employees to take on some of the “most interesting and important” problems in the world, he stated. “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,” stated Poole.
