Google Reader Co-Founder Announces New Mystery Project

Entrepreneur and Google Reader co-founder, Jason Shellen, has let us know about his latest venture in conjunction with Thing Labs, a name that is as ambiguous as it is stealthy.

Thier super secret new product, developed in conjunction with Shellen's Reader co-founder, Chris Wetherell, will be out at the end of June and is based on recently acquired technology from Wetherell. "We're not talking too much about it, but it is a new social media application that works with your existing networks, Twitter and a few others. We don't want to say too much more, but the technology gives us a really interesting interface." Shellen also revealed that another top-level new hire will be coming aboard soon.

Thing Labs collaborators include Wetherell (who will be an official Thing Labs employee as of Monday), Zachary Taylor, Grant Shellen, Wesley Beary, and Corinna Psomadakis. The company's backers are Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, and Michael Jones.

Thing Labs was born from Plinky, Inc. "Plinky.com is doing well and will continue on," said Shellen, "but since it's not the only product we are working on, we felt the need to change the company name to reflect the new direction."

"We have a good base of users at Plinky, but we started experimenting more and sped up the cycle for improving that. We thought we should continue, so then we joined efforts with Chris and started a new approach for releasing new products."

It appears as though Shellen and the rest of the Thing Labs crew are keeping this project under tight wraps. We and the rest of the tech world will be watching closely as this new mystery product unfolds in the weeks to come.