Our little seeds are growing!!

I'm so extremely proud of the work we're doing here at Zaadz, especially in the past month, and in just the past week Francois added photo albums, and integrated a cool way of viewing pictures (try it out - go to yours or anybody's photos page and click on a photo -- the screen dims and boom up pops a larger version. 

Rob is hard at work improving our mail client - you can now message multiple friends at once, delete messages (believe it or not we didn't implement that for a while, and boy did we need it!), and forward messages. We've also made your invite manager a bit easier to read and allowed you to re-read the message you sent them. And there's a a lot more to come... (Oh, AND he added that new page where you can read all of your friends' blogs!)

Josh has been the man behind the scenes.... among other things he's been doing over the past few weeks, he's helped get our brand new Ambassadors tab up, single-handedly knocked out a whole slew of bugs -- many of which came up as a result of our recent transition to Rails 1.1. He's currently working on an idea whose time is overdue, and you'll see it within a few days!

Ryan? What's he been up to? Well, you know how you can now subscribe to pods and photos and blogs and even users? That's him. And now we've got him working on one of the Zaadz Grow! features... including a whole new type of pod.

Aaron led the transition to Rails 1.1, launched the new home page, launched the ambassadors tab, made pods even prettier and more useful than before (and he's got much more of that coming down soon...)... and of course, you just KNOW this wizard has more up his sleeve.

So that leaves - of the development team - me! I just launched a great new pod user management tool that I'm sure will make life easier for people running pods (and that number will grow tremendously in a very short time...) as well as added a much more intuitive process for inviting people (both Zaadz members AND non-members) to pods. Now I'm turning my sights to adding new content to the pods! First we had discussion groups... hmmm - what else is coming?

I look at all the new, cool stuff coming from the team lately and - knowing what I do about our roadmap - I know the pace is only getting faster. But one of the things that will make us different from myspace or tribe or friendster is what I told the rest of the dev team yesterday in a meeting: "I'd LOVE you to give yourself time to just sit down and ponder the best solution."

We're not about pumping out mindless features at a mind-numbing rate. We're not about music on your page or being able to make your background a hazy shade of purple (not that we would stop you). We're about creating tools for people who want to change the world. And some of those tools are going to be crazy-great, and some of them are going to be so obvious everybody wonders why we didn't have them before. But all of them... all of them... will be crafted with loving care and thoughtfulness, as long as I have something to say about it. 

Zaadz will not be a site with 10,000 unrelated features. Zaadz WILL be a site where the interconnections between people, technology and information help each of us manifest our vision for a better world.

That's why I'm so proud and happy. I work for a company that allows me to make the decisions I need to BELIEVE we can make this a reality.

(P.S. Brian and the rest of the Zaadz team are doing incredible stuff too. I just don't have as much exposure to their work as I do the development team... so hats off to everyone!)