On Saturday I finally accomplished the goal I set out to complete in October of 1996. In reality, it was a goal I set for myself when I was somewhere around 7 years old. I completed my BS in Computer Science. I'm glad I attended the commencement ceremony, it really put a period at the end of the 11 year trail I took to get here. I was even a minor celebrity at the event. So now I'm officially a scientist! I even get to include it on my corporate profile. Not having my degree was never something that got in my way, since I had taken almost all of my courses before I left school the first time. It really does feel like my career is more grounded now, though. It's somewhat hard to describe.

At the end of the year I'll be leaving my favorite company to work for (up until this point) - Jobster. I'll be cutting the strings to go full time and full speed ahead on RescueTime. I feel like I've learned so much in the last <2 years - enough that I'm ready to go at it for real this time. With Jobby, I was in a little over my head. Now, I'm extremely confident that I can help to start and run a company at this point in my career. RescueTime is already building up a lot of good traction and interest without any real market prodding. It speaks to the fact that people really seem to have the problems we're trying to help solve, and are very much in need of a good product to help them.

So, next year should be exciting! I'll be focused on only one thing (effort-wise) for the first time in years. While the road ahead will be very energy-consuming, I'll actually be less burdened than I have in a while, and it should go quite smoothly. 2007 was a year of learning, branching out, refactoring, and accomplishment. 2008 will hopefully be the beginning of a whole new phase in my life and career. Wow, does that sound sappy.

As many of the people who read this journal already know, I'm pretty active in several areas of Facebook application development - with a project I'm doing at my job (the Jobster app) and some projects I'm doing on my own for fun (Favorite Games and some others I haven't launched yet). During the time I've spent working in and around Facebook, both as a developer and as an observer of a full-fledged business partnership, I feel like I've gained quite a bit of insight into their operating practices and strategies. The jury is out about whether or not Facebook itself will break out of it's current classification as probably-just-another-social-network and launch into something entirely new (my gut says it will), but I feel like making a prediction about a new business model that the folks there will likely soon introduce. This article is mostly meant to be a brain dump for me more than anything else. I'm not a practiced market analyst or web prognosticator, I'm just exploring some ideas that have recently struck me as interesting.

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Here's the latest article about the new Jobster Facebook app I worked on.

There've been several articles lately, all of them with great things to say.

The application has over 42,000 users now. I'm getting to work on a new feature that will launch soon that brings back some of the spirit of Jobby, which should only increase our adoption numbers.

Here's hoping this Facebook thing takes off. ;) I should say, though, that I'm currently working on an article about some Facebook application fishiness I've been uncovering. I think it's interesting how they're positioning their application ownership. I don't think people quite understand the leverage Facebook has in this space. More on that soon.

EDIT: Here's the article I was talking about.

We launched the Career Center on Facebook today. Go ahead and join if you've got a Facebook profile.

A lot of work went into this initial release, but we've just started. Lots more tailored dynamic content and interactive elements are in the works. We really want to make the Career Center a great place to go to find your way into the job market, get connected with people, show off your skills, and get matched to your ideal job.

This may turn out to be the most important application I've ever worked on. There's a lot of pressure to deliver here. We still have a lot to do, but I'm excited about where this is going.

We just released a new version of Jobster.

You can read about it all on:

- TechCrunch
- The Wall Street Journal
- The Jobster Blog
- probably lots of other news sites and blogs soon...

Big announcements:

- It's free to post a job on Jobster! No need to spend $475 for a post on monster.com. Superstar tags match jobs with people. This is the realization of one of the directions we wanted to go with Jobby.

- Jobster will be powering the Career Center on Facebook. (That's why I was in Palo Alto/San Francisco last week. Those guys are great.)

My Jobster profile looks so much better than my resume that I'm done updating my resume. I've retired it. From now on, everything that would go into my resume will find its way onto my Jobster profile.

We launched a new release of Jobster this week that is the first step in what I think will help put an end to resumes. Paper resumes are on their way out, so why bother trying to recreate the same tired format in electronic form? Why not just start over.

Superstar tags are an extension of the ideas we came up with in Jobby. You can't be an expert in everything. You can be found easier if you tag yourself, but you must choose wisely. It's not good enough to just spam your resume with every keyword you can possibly think of that might get a recruiter's attention. Superstar tags force you to target your profile in the direction you want to be found, so you'd better be able to back it up.

This is just the first step. Next come all kinds of search enhancements using new tag-based matching technologies and filtering. After that, the job boards can kiss their business model goodbye.

Check out my Jobster profile! We've added some new features, including sticky notes (make an account so you can leave me one), number of views (I want my view count to go up, so link!) and similarly tagged people and companies (you can navigate around people's profiles who are similar to you, and check out other companies you might want to work for).

Also, tagging yourself now actually is useful. In the coming months you're going to see more ways to find and match people and companies with tags. We're also going to set up tag community pages. Jobster profiles are also highly findable on google, so you can search engine optimize your career!

In the future you'll be able to add your favorite links and upload your actual resume (boring! We think Jobster profiles are better than resumes).

So come on! And tag yourself awesome while you're at it!

The relaunch of Jobster is a pretty big deal.

The Washington Post thinks so.

This article does a good job of describing the current state of Jobster and what we're doing. I also like it because it mentions Jobby... :)

I got to sit in on a few user tests yesterday. We sat behind a 1 way mirror and watched people interact with the site. Really learned a lot about how different people get different things from the experience, and what things are difficult or confusing.

Lots of stuff to do, still, but it helps that I love my job.

It's always great when the company you work for is featured in the Wall Street Journal.

Here's a link Jason Goldberg's blog post about it since the WSJ is subscription only.

Here is a great article about Jobby and Jobster from the Anchorage Daily News. Tony and I posed for pictures for the print version.

Jobster announced the acquisition of Jobby on their blog tonight

These guys are great. Looking forward to getting to work with them.