Well, I hope all of you are happy and healthy as we head into the New Year. Personally, I've been struggling with a winter bug these past few weeks that has slowed down some of our anticipated progress on the site.

Fortunately, I'm recovering and getting my coding gloves back on again. In addition to Ryan and myself, we're going to be taking on a few new developers at zaadz. If you happen to be a RubyonRails jock and want to get involved, see our job posting at rubynow.com.

We should have a bunch of new features and tools coming this month. Thanks again to everyone that's provided feedback and please keep it coming!

Hey all,

I just had an amazing weekend. This amazingness was brought about by my friends at the Landmark Forum. My burning Man buddies have been trying to get me to go for the longest time and I finally bit the bullet and did the beginning weekend.

What an awesome ride! It's like they bring you through a transforative experience of... well... something akin to enlightenment just with the power of words. An amazing seminar that must be experienced to be appreciated.

Anyway, it's given me a huge boost of inspiration in my life as to what is possible for me.

Then, out of the blue, someone called me who I've been meaning to get a tarot reading from. The pivotal card in the reading was the AEON card. It's all aout stepping forward into owning the responsibility for the direction of our lives. That's the boost I got from the forum this weekend and I'm bursting forth with some power! ;)

I feel very grateful to be supported in this effort by a bunch of beautiful poeple. We've just hired 3 new programmers. Please say hi to Francois, Jake and Rob. They are REALLY excited to bring the zaadz to life and they're doing it for all of you beautiful people.

I love you all,

-Aeon

Brian was on this rant the other day about zaadz and silos. At first I thought he had just drank too many of those superfood shakes he's been into recently but then he showed me Nick's very interesting blog about going beyond the silo with social networking.

Basically, what Nick is talking about is the difference between a site that has a very specific focus and therefore limits itself to a niche audience (silo) and those with a broader focus and therefore, a more diverse user-base (perch).

First of all, I just want to make a distinction about who zaadz is serving. When we first came up with the idea for zaadz, we talked about creating a community for 'spiritual' people. Unfortunately, the word 'spiritual' normally conjures up a vision of groups of monks sitting in silent meditation or perhaps, like Nick mentions, a bunch of idealistic vegans.

Our big realization is that 'spiritual' doesn't have to be put into a box (or a silo). We believe that spirituality is about following your soul's purpose, whether that's about doing yoga,  spinning poi or creating the next big thing on the web.

And speaking of the next big thing, yes, it's true that social networking is going to blow up over the course of the next year or two. I would expect there to be hundreds of social networking sites popping up in the near future. Of course, it would be nice if there was some kind of standard for managing my global profile across multiple sites, but then who's going to come up with that standard and how is it going to be adopted?

In my personal opinion, that's not going to happen. What will happen is that 100s of social networking sites will appear across the web landscape and the ones that will survive will be the ones that are providing real value for their customers.

I've seen it all play out before. Do you know how many free web based email services there used to be? Now there's maybe 3 main ones because they are the ones that survived the market. Yep, the internet is still a market. I won't go off on a Brian tangent but it does take money to support these free services and that money is coming from somewhere.

So how will Zaadz survive the social networking boom and come out standing on the other side?

1. We have a solid business model. Free services are nice but at a certain point, all businesses have to consider their bottom line. We figured that out a few years ago. It was called the .com bust.
   
   I mean, I love tribe.net too but look what happened. Mark Pincus, the founder had a pure vision to create online community. The idea was great, it got really big, and now you've got some ex pepsi / procter & gamble exec trying to figure out how to make money off of the thing.
   
   Better or worse than starting with a both a financial plan and the passion to create community?
   
   
2. We're creating an ethos. Far from a box, an ethos simply conveys the values of the community we're trying to build. Much like Burning Man sets up a container within which people can freely express themselves.
   
   So what's the ethos of zaadz? Basically we're trying to raise the center of gravity and encourage people to be passionate about the lives they're living and inspire and empower others to live fully and make a difference in the world.
   
   Far from the traditional, 'meat market' approach that most social networking sites have adopted, we stand for change in the world, and you end up getting conversations like this on the site. (check out the comments... neat, huh?)
   
   
3. We're going to be inclusive.
   
   We keep getting requests for tools that will allow people to import their existing blogs and content from other sites into their zaadz profile. Believe me, I'm working on it right now.
   
   By integrating tools that other sites have provided to share content, (other blogs, flickr feeds, 43things goals, etc) we open up the silo even more. It's my belief that in doing this, we'll create a standard where it's imperative that you open your software up to the public or you risk losing your audience to 'yet another login' syndrome.

So, in conclusion... zaadz: silo vs perch? - I dunno. I like to think of zaadz as a city - An exercise in building intentional community online.

-A

Hey all,

This is my post on the recent goings on at tribe. I am a tribe member and have been for a long time. In fact, tribe was one of my main inspirations in designing the community we're bulding at zaadz.

The thing I love most about tribe is the people. It seems/seemed to attract the edgy, alternative Burning Man type crowd. These are the people that I owe my own personal evolution to as I spent much of the past 5 years 'finding myself' while dancing to techno music under the full moon in the middle of some desert in southern california.

When Brian and I came together to create zaadz, we had the intention of creating a community for people who were seeking... spirituality, self-expression, fulfillment, success in life... or whatever you want to call it. I came at it from the alternative, fluffy, spiritual side; Brian came at it from the more grounded, practical, business side.

Turns out, that makes a pretty powerful combination.

You might notice some references to capitalism or, in particular, the merging of spirituality and capitalism on the site. Some people are put off by that, but guess what? it's very intentional.

If there's anything we should know about living in this world in the 21st century, it's that if something is going to be successful in the long term, it must be sustainable. Tribe is an example of a great idea that just wasn't sustainable. I'm not saying that it couldn't have been or that it won't be in the future, but the vision with which it was created has fundamentally changed because making the money the site needed to stay in business was a hindsight.

I won't get into the details. You can read a little about my thoughts in my last blog post.

I just want to say that the recent changes over at tribe are a dissapointment to me as well. Fortunately, I'm not as impacted by them as some because I'm building my own social networking site ;)

While I mourn the loss of the alternative 'edge' at tribe in their decision to go mainstream, I'm elated to be the foster parent of thousands of tribe users who 'get it'. This site is built for you and we're here to honor your feedback and comments... not ignore them.

Just so you know, we're doing everything we can to serve the users who are coming over from tribe. We have a limited set of tools right now, but  we're pushing to get certain pieces of functionality launched that will pave the way for more interactivity on the site. In fact, this morning we decided to alter our current development plan so we can launch our tribe/group functionality by Mid-February, much sooner than we originally anticipated.

I'd love to tell you more about our plans and what's coming but I don't think I can cover it all here. Please leave your comments or message me persoanlly and I'll get back to you with any details you'd like to know.

We'll be in touch.

Peace,

-A

With the recent tribe exodus, things have suddenly gotten a lot more exciting here at zaadz.

My personal challenge right now is figuring out how to split my time between the UI improvements I've been wanting to do to make content more globally accessible and the basic code churning that needs to be done to release our "pods" functionality.

That leaves me very little time for actual design work (which I love, BTW). So I'm getting the sense that it's time to spread the zaadz and get some help in this department.

Zaadz is looking for a part time designer with a high level of CSS experience to do some immediate design work on certain areas of the site. One of my main priorites right now is to figure out how to address the "stark white" issue, which I personally find to be rather hilarious. (more on that here)

My initial thought is to create both white and slate grey versions of the site in css and then put a dynamic css selector on the page so users can switch between the "light side" and the "dark side" of the force. (so to speak)

So, you wanna work for zaadz? Message me.
http://jobs.rubynow.com/jobs/show/171

I just got my Burning Man tickets delivered. The envelope was a little fatter than I would have expected. When I opened it, there were some extra goodies in there: an atomic fireball and a lemonhead... whee!

Although I don't really eat candy anymore, it just goes to show that someone put in a little extra effort to make sure I had a good experience, and that they actually care.

One of the things I love most about development is the ability to respond to user feedack within a matter of hours. For example, on our zaadz tribe, someone mentioned that they didn't want to have the flag on their profile and I was able to create an option for that and turn it around within an hour.

This is the kind of thing that fires us up and it's why we were so successful at our last venture, eteamz. (notice the z!)

Every suggestion is important to us, no matter how small. So, let us know what you wanna see.