But while we’re working on the algorithm, it just does some neato analytics on your data. We’ll be adding more analytics once we get the friend import stuff working – we we can analyze how you interact with your friends and look for trends. Then we’ll really start to tackle the suggestion engine. We have what we think are some pretty cool ideas for that part.

Stats Dashboard

Fullscreen Map View

This is just a quickie screenshot set of what the stats look like for me (and I’ve only been using Foursquare for 2 weeks while building this app). If you want to sign up and play with it, let me know and I’ll get you the link to the beta site!

Clipped from RescueTime which is a fantastic freemium app that tracks everything you do on all of your computers and then does analysis of how you spend your time.

Pretty cool, huh?

I conjecture that this paradox is the reason that highly motivated people tend to learn in smaller incremental steps rather than diving head-first into a new technology.  It’s basically impossible to satisfy both these main motivators at once.  Not 100% sure what I’m going to do for this project I’m working on right now, but I think I’m going to sacrifice speed in order to learn something new. We’ll see if I can keep that up for very long.

How do you deal with this paradox? I’m curious.

If you picture a cross between Mint.com and Google Analytics, but instead of looking at your bank accounts or your web stats, we’re looking at the motivators and behaviors of the people you work with. TalentScan gives you really interesting information about your employees that you probably didn’t know.  It discusses their dominant workplace motivators, workplace behaviors, ideal workplace and life priorities.  And that’s just for starters.  Plus, it’s totally free to try it out and get quite a lot of useful information without even giving us your credit card info.

Planning to unveil all the details over the next few weeks as we march towards the public launch, but you can get a quick peek and register for notifications over at TalentScanApp.com and we might even squeeze you in to our beta test group!

Update: It’s now a public beta open to the public!

We timed it and it only takes 60 seconds to sign up, upload some pics and have your site live.  Beat that with any other site and I’ll be surprised…

I’ve personally found that most non-makers are completely oblivious to how much having even short meetings during the day can disrupt our work process.  I can’t remember where I read it (maybe Joel Spolsky) but I recall a discussion about how if it takes 15 or 30 minutes for a developer to “get in the zone”, a couple 15 second distractions can ruin a whole day of productivity.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. [...]

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

[full essay here]

On a related note, why in the world does Paul Graham not have an RSS feed for his essays??  Dave Winer needs to make that happen.

This is what I have come to recognize as the cause of my current state of discontent.  I have been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, which of course only happens when I have too much time for self-reflection.  My preference is to occupy myself with exciting (read: cutting edge, innovative) projects rather than silly introspection.

Now, it’s true that I have done several things this year with which I’m quite satisfied.  I’ve started making some good friends here in LA as the two-year anniversary of my moving west has come and gone.  We added the Atlanta Braves as yet another flagship Photocore client. I was involved in launching a free career assessment aimed at helping young people understand themselves and find their ideal job (more about that later).  But none of these satisfy my basal thirst for innovation.

I’ve had a handful of ideas germinating for a while, some of which have made it to concept or design phases.  And except for the one idea was pre-empted by Google (damn them!), they are viable business ideas and with enough effort they might be profitable.  But while “profitability” is on my list of positive adjectives for a a crazy idea, “fun”, “interesting” and “innovative” are higher on that list.

I would rather be involved in something unique than something profitable.

The two full-time jobs that I’ve worked since graduation were both companies that I chose for other than monetary reasons.  In the first case, I turned down an offer for a significantly higher salary to work at a promising small company that was doing very cool things in the area of IPTV and social networking.  Then, when I decided to leave that company, I happily took a cut to work with a company who had grand ideas about how to revolutionize their market.  I saw the opportunity to help the company take those great ideas from concept to execution and that really got me excited.

People who are smarter than me probably already are intimately familiar with what motivates them.  For me, I had some sort of mental block on the whole thing.  So I, rather accidently, went another route.

Recently, I took two very different career/personality assessments.

The first was the Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test – a spoof on that Myers-Briggs personality test.  After twelve questions it announced that I was ICIG (the Entrepreneur) which is defined as

“A bubbling energetic type often with boundless energy and a short attention span. Has a pattern of getting enthused about a project, starting it up and leaving the rest to others.”

I think it totally pegged me – surprisingly for a test written as a spoof – as a person who likes to start something big and leave the details to someone else while I start on something else.  I could never work at a large company maintaining software.  Running naked from an axe murderer in a room full of cacti would be a preferable fate.  This assessment gets an “A” for accuracy and a gold star in the plays-well-with-others column.

The second assessment I took was the YSN Self-Assessment.  This is a seriously serious assessment build by a crack team of authors, recruiters, scientists and engineers (including me!)  It didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know, but it did distill a few things for me that I hadn’t characterized so simply.  Among other things, the assessment measures your “values” which are evidently the things that motivate you to do what you do.  Based on a 30 minute Q&A session on the website, it tells you how your values stack up.  My strongest value? Uniqueness.  Next? Knowledge.  Ok, next? Anti-Structure.  Money is 5th out of 6. And I think that pretty much explains exactly what makes me tick.

Here are a few choice snippets from the premium version of my report:

• Your creativity is not constrained by criticism from others.
• You have a high energy level and work hard at meeting goals.
• You have a knack for creating solutions sometimes more through personal attempts, calculated risks, and creativity than in the book or established procedures.

Yes – I don’t care what other people thing about my ideas or opinions. Yes – when I’m excited about a goal I will hit it with no equivocation.  Yes – I can’t stand doing things by-the-book.  “A” for accuracy here too, and I can’t take any of that credit because I didn’t invent the science, I just automated it.

So how did both of these assessments actually help me?

Well, I can’t honestly say that they helped me in any concrete way, but they did get me thinking in different terms. They confirmed that for the remaining 209 days of this year I need to be working on things that excite me.  It means no more watching a season or two of some TV show over the weekend.  No more busywork. No more laziness. No more sleeping unless absolutely necessary.

Oh, and maybe I’ll write more blog posts too.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that I may have given the impression that I work for peanuts just so that I can do cool things. That’s not true, I get what I would consider an industry-standard salary for my position.  What I was trying to impart is that there are things more important to me than money when making career and project decisions.  When you have just enough money to live the lifestyle that you desire, then you can really focus on choosing things that make you happy.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have more employement options than some, so I have been able to be picky about what I choose to do.  Money can’t buy you love, and at least in my case, money can’t buy me job satisfaction.

if you spend more than five minutes thinking about where to eat today, edaah will come to the rescue. by keeping track of where you eat, we can make sure you don’t repeat too often and can help to find a place your group of friends can all enjoy for any occasion.

we just launched the beta site – check out my page and then sign up for yourself.

Why?

Because it has a visual race viewer – you watch cars progress throughout the race (no coin flips).
Because it is based on Physics – heavier, faster cars aren’t always great around the turns.
Because it has technical tracks – we build track data based on the severity of the turn, lengths of the segments, etc.
Because you can race people who aren’t your friends.
Because you don’t have to invite people to play the game!

I’ll let the rest of you fill in the blanks after you go play.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7900548411