Lars Rasmussen. "I think if you were to ask me two or three years ago if Facebook was going to be this big, I wouldn't have picked it. And I have a great deal to learn there from Mark and his team," he said. Rasmussen, who parted company with Google on Friday, will leave Sydney and move to San Francisco. He intends to start work at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters next month after "a whole lotta rest" on a beach somewhere. "I've got a job description of 'come hang out with us for a while and we'll see what happens', which is a pretty exciting thing," he said. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the appointment saying that the company was "thrilled [that Rasmussen will] be part of Facebook's world-class engineering team to help design transformative technologies".

Alan Noble, Google Australia's engineering director, said: "Lars made great contributions to Google in innovative products like Google Maps and Google Wave. He was also instrumental in starting engineering in the Google Sydney office. We wish him all the best." Google Wave The decision to move on comes less than two months after the company said it would scrap Rasmussen's pet project, Google Wave, a visionary attempt to redefine the tools for online communication and collaboration. "We were not quite the success that Google was hoping for, and trying to persuade them not to pull the plug and ultimately failing was obviously a little stressful," the Danish-born computer science engineer said. Wave had won the backing of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who gave the project his personal tick of approval when it was unveiled in May last year.

But despite some impressive features, Wave failed to gain traction. Once the novelty wore off, it began losing momentum and users. "It wasn't something that I would like to bet my life on, but all that excitement we created when we first unveiled the project was based on something real," Rasmussen said. "It takes a while for something new and different to find its footing and I think Google was just not patient." Leaving 'paradise' Rasmussen, his brother Jens and Australians Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma founded and later sold what became known as Google Maps to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2004. The quartet formed the core of the Google Wave team. The other team members are understood to be remaining with Google.

Rasmussen said one of the hardest parts of his decision was to leave the "super, super smart people" on the Wave team and his harbourside home in Sydney. "I love it here and it took a lot for my wife and I to get past that hurdle that we will be leaving paradise." He said he would keep the house and would find any excuse to come back to Australia. Big company v small company Rasmussen said another reason for leaving was that Google was becoming too unwieldy. He made several comments about Facebook's smaller size and how this made it easier to make an impact and get things done.

While Google employs 25,000 staff members, Facebook has about 2000. "The energy there is just amazing, whereas it can be very challenging to be working in a company the size of Google," Rasmussen said. Last year Google designer Douglas Bowman famously quit, complaining in a blog post that the company had become obsessed by data and minutiae. "I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that," Bowman complained. Flight to Facebook

On the plus side, Rasmussen said he would be working once again with two former Google colleagues: Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor and platform manager Carl Sjogreen. Taylor worked with Rasmussen on Google Maps in the early days and Sjogreen, who was based in Sydney for a while, worked on both Google Maps and Wave. Sjogreen joined Facebook last month after Facebook bought his social networking travel site, Nextstop.com. "A good part of the reason I'm going there is that there are particular folks who worked at Google before who I loved working with and who are there now and that's very attractive," Rasmussen said. The three amigos are part of what is becoming a growing community of ex-Googlers (sometimes referred to as Xooglers) at Facebook. Glenn Kelman, from online real estate agent Redfin, estimates that 20 per cent of Facebook's employees have worked at Google at some stage in their careers.

Other Google alumni include chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, former Google Chrome architect Matthew Papakipos and former Android senior product manager Erick Tseng. Even Google's one-time executive chef Josef Desimone has decamped eight kilometres east to take up duties at Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters. Another reason was that the Facebook offer was just too good to refuse. Rasmussen said that Facebook's offer was "much more compelling both financially and in terms of the work there". While he did not provide details about the offer, it is common for companies such as Facebook, which is only six years old, to offer new employees shares or options. Based on current valuations, Facebook is worth more than $US30 billion and, when the company is listed on the stock exchange, those shares and options could turn many of its employees into multimillionaires. Lars Rasmussen on …

Mark Zuckerberg: "I've met Mark a couple of times and he's obviously a super smart guy and very enthusiastic about building stuff and getting it out there and seeing if it works. And that's very attractive." The Social Network movie: "It came out literally as I was talking to Mark and some of the people who were working there. I decided that Hollywood shouldn't have quite that impact on my professional choices and so I decided not to see it." On social versus search: "I do think that social is a significantly less explored area still than search and it is sort of the frontier of technology in many ways. But that doesn't mean in any way that search is obsolete or even close to being obsolete. We are all going to be using search many, many times a day every day of our lives, forever." Loading The future of Wave: "I hope what will come out of it is at least that some of the ideas will find their way into different products. There are still a small subset of the team that are working on open sourcing parts of the code and so I hope that before the end of the year a lot of it will be out there for other people to work on."

Taking a Wave idea to Facebook: "It's not my intention or Facebook's intention that I will go on to do something similar. But I'll give that particular mission a rest at least for a couple of years. Hopefully other people will pick up on it and do something better than what we were able to achieve."