Tech giant Google has surprised the tech community by hiring Christopher "moot" Poole, the founder of the infamous 4chan internet image board.

"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," Poole posted on his Tumblr account.

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On the other hand, Google vice president of streams, photos and sharing Bradley Horowitz confirmed the news with a post on his Google+ account.

Poole's reference to "online communities" and the confirmation of Horowitz has led many netizens to speculate that Poole will help Google in its social media services. Although Google is one of the biggest and most successful tech companies today, the search-engine giant has failed - several tries - to capitalize on the social media platform.

In November 2015, Google announced that it is overhauling its social network into some sort of Reddit and Pinterest mash-up rather than a straightforward duplicate of Facebook. Despite its efforts, Google's social media arm still was not able to push its boundaries.

Poole, who uses the online pseudonym moot, founded 4chan in 2003 when he was just 15 years old. Today, 4chan has a regular monthly unique visitors of around 22 million.

Although the 4chan of today caters to a wide range of interest, it was not the same during the website's hey days. The website became the breeding ground for memes like LOLcats and the internet practice of Rickrolling. The website also came into the mainstream consciousness following a huge dump of hacked private photographs of at least 100 high profile female celebrities in 2014. Additionally, 4chan is most well known as the cradle of the internet hacktivist group Anonymous.

Tags4chan, chris poole, chris moot poole, moot, 4chan founder, moot 4chan