The Brilliant Niniane Wang

... works on a confidential Google project

Google ran a full-page ad in Wired with this text:

"Google is looking for engineers with great aspirations. Take Niniane Wang, for example. A co-inventor of 19 patents in various patents of filing, Niniane skipped three grades, learned the Lisp programming language at 10, and started college math classes at 11. At 18, Niniane graduated with a degree in computer science from Caltech (where she also designed a VLSI chip, built an audio recorder out of chips, and discovered she loved writing software).

We're privileged to have Niniane at Google, but we need more engineers like her - people with passion and ideals and a strong work ethic.

Check out www.google.com/aspireniniane for a list of current openings. If you see something that seems perfect for you, send us your resume, we'd love to hear from you. Cute childhood pictures optional."

Meanwhile, Niniane writes in her blog:

This morning Joby sent out an email to our team:


i realized today during the meeting that...

- if we're working on the best project at google, and
- we're working at the best company on the planet, then

we're working on the Best Project in the World.

Her resume shows that she worked for Microsoft Flight Simulator, movie onebox, Google Desktop Search, Gmail and a confidential project.

But what did she do for this great project?

* Envisioned and chartered a confidential project in the social application space. Spec'ed out vision and got buy-in from execs.

* Led a team of engineers through technical design and implementation of client (C++) and server (Java).

* Convinced artists, PM, UI designer, and engineers around the company to join the team or contribute 20% time.

So the best project still unlaunched at Google is a social network? Maybe a MySpace killer?