“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
~ Margaret Meade

I remember it like yesterday. Two years ago I’ve embarked on a journey of pure serendipity. I left a relatively secured job to join a start up with a team of idealistic people I haven’t even met in person before. The reason I took the job was to experience change in my life while doing something that would have an impact in other people’s lives. Our team believed that social networking technology can be used to inspire and empower people by providing an online oasis where they can have meaningful conversations, freely express their beliefs, dreams, interests, creativity, and spirituality, without worrying about being judged and ridiculed. It was the early days of Zaadz.

Running a social network is as challenging as it is rewarding. Slowly but surely we grew our humble community. We resisted the urge of growing too quickly by focusing on quality of members rather than quantity. As a result, our growth was slow and organic. And therein lies our biggest challenge: sustainability. Our team and CEO at that time, Brian, had to make a hard choice: pack it up and call it a day, break up the team and keep on going, or keep the team and the community intact by finding a company that aligns with our vision and values. GAIAM came to the rescue. It was a perfect fit. Zaadz eventually transformed into Gaia Community. Our niche community continued to flourish.

Fast forward a year later, our biggest challenge–sustainability–is still there, only this time the harsh reality of our current economy had caught up on us as well. To make the long story short, GAIAM had to make cutbacks. Unfortunately, my position was one of those affected. So as of yesterday, I’m no longer working for Gaia Community.

[NOTE: See Siona's blog for details. To all Gaia Community members: I may no longer work for Gaia but I'm still part of our community. Time-permitting, I'll continue to visit, interact, and answer your questions. So feel free to email me and drop by my grapevine once in a while ]

In spite of what happened, I’m still grateful for the opportunity to build something that is meaningful to others. Over the years I’ve met a lot people, online and offline, who had expressed their gratitude and love for the community we’ve started. I often hear the expression, “Thank you for what you do. I feel at home here,” whenever people describe their experience on Gaia. This made me proud and gave me goosebumps. How often do we hear people thanking us for making their lives a little better? I never got tired of hearing praises like that during my stay with Gaia. I’ll miss that part of my job.

Another thing I would terribly miss is my daily interaction with the Gaia team. I work remotely and have had very minimal physical interaction with them, but we’re like kindred souls online. It was a pleasure to share with them this journey. They’re the most passionate and compassionate people I’ve worked with. I wish them well.

Finally, I’ve also greatly benefited from Zaadz/Gaia on a personal level. For instance, I was able to work remotely from Ireland to be with my (then) future wife. Zaadz/Gaia will always be part of our family story.

So, what am I going to do next?

Short answer: I don’t know. A part of me wants to continue to find fulfulling work wherein I can leverage all the things I’ve learned from growing online communities, community support, moderation, social networking, and social media strategies. But another part of me wants to take the path of least resistance and go back to the corporate world of cubicles, office politics, status reports, and endless unproductive meetings. If it’s just me, I would take the former option. But the reality is that there are people who depend on me, so I’m considering the latter. I may be an idealist, but I’m also a practical person. Thanks to my pragmatic personality and my Asian cultural upbringing.

In any case, the biggest challenge for me is dealing with homeostasis. For the past couple of years I’ve gotten used to working remotely. As soon as I got up in the morning I was only a few steps away from work. There were days when I didn’t even bother to take a shower or change my sleeping clothes. (I sometimes teased my teammate, Matthew, that I work naked. I think he liked it.) I’ll miss the freedom, flexibility, and the less carbon-footprint lifestyle (i.e. for two years, I didn’t have to drive to work). I’m hoping I can telecommute in my next job.

Another adjustment I’d have to deal with is that, I won’t have the privilege of spending as much time online as I did before. I’ll do my best to keep up with my (hyper)streaming practice. But I’ll probably go under the radar again. I’m not comfortable mixing my online and personal/career life.

In the meantime, I’ll use my free time to reflect on things I’ve been putting off. One door closes, another opens. But I’m not getting any younger. So it’s time I shift my attention to what really matters.

P.S. Touched to my tenderness. This is why I will miss Gaia – http://bit.ly/2MpZ9d. I’m honored to have served you. Thank you for the opportunity.

It’s barely a day since Zaadz transformed into Gaia and I’m already feeling a pinch of nostalgia. Most members have embraced the change. Some members have expressed sadness and protest. We (the team) feel their zaadness. We have our reasons. Zaadz will always be special to us. We’ve (the team and members)
taken a cryptic Dutch word and gave it a new meaning in cyberspace.
We’ve made it hot. We’ve made it fluffy. We’ve made it cool. We’d like
to thank all 150,000+ members who made Zaadz a sweet success.

Our deepest gratitude to all of you! 

But the time has come to practice what we preach — to be the change so
we could change our world. And there’s nothing more fitting than this
serendipitous quote from William Butler Yeats.

"Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing." ~William Butler Yeats

Thanks again to all our members. If you’ve grown to love Zaadz, you’ll
love what Gaia has in store for you (and that purple color will sink in
too ). We’re just getting started. Here’s to more adventures that lie
ahead.

Keep on growing and flowing…

Eating Doritos Chilli Heatwave and drinking Red Bull while watching cheesy DVDs.

Speaking of Doritos, this site is flamin’ hot!

Eat and drink at your own peril.

Looking forward to coming home to the Emerald City with ~myDakini.

I offer the world a gift of Trinity — image, music, and poetry.

Image:

Music: My rendition of the classic tune, Sleepwalk, with a holiday twist.

Poetry:

"Argue
with me if you will, but I tend to think that the sheer customizability
of Myspace’s profiles and the application-overburdened nature Facebook
profiles (a seeming paradise of self-expression) instead creates
over-stimulated jumbles of things that are not-quite-me. LinkedIn’s
profiles have a singularity of purpose that actually expresses the
employable-me a lot more effectively, but what about creativity?And
even though most of these networks allow members to post a variety of
different types of content, their focus is clearly on people and user’s
creations have to sit a few pages deeper.

"On the other hand, social networks for expression tend to be focused
around certain types of creative content (Flickr, photos; Youtube,
videos; Twitter, text notes) and make sharing your creations extremely
easy. On those sites, your expression, your creativity, – your
creations – become the focus, and the connecting power of the network
fades into the background. "How, then, would the former kind of network
nurture greater levels and depth of expression?"

Jake goes on to say that streamlining content creation, highlighting user content on profiles, and favoring content creation over lots of widgets, are some ways of achieving this "greater levels and depth of expression."

I couldn’t agree more.

I agree with Jake that Tumblr does a great job at this. Microblogging services like Tumblr is at the edge of the evolution of personal publishing.
I’ve been aware of Tumblr but I haven’t used it until today. And I
already love it! In fact, I’ll even commit a blasphemy and say
that I like it much better than Twitter It only took minutes to
create my Tumblr site and configure it to feed off from my main personal blog. Check it out.

http://c4chaos.tumblr.com/

If only I have more Tumblr friends…

What I particularly like about Tumblr is the filter feature. With just a click, I can remix my stream of thought with people in my Tumblr network. ReadWriteWeb is right: "…remixing
other users’ posts and allowing people to subscribe to each other’s
messages was the stroke of genius that made Twitter a hit. But while
Twitter is probably a descendant of a chat and social networking,
Tumblr is a direct remix of blogging and social networking."

Here’s a question:
How can a light microblogging application like Tumblr integrate my
personal blog and my main social network? Simple. Via RSS feeds.

For example, in Zaadz, members have an activity stream which is also generated as a RSS feed. Note that members have privacy and granular control of their activity stream.
They can make their activity stream private, friends only, or public.
They could also select which types of activity to include in the
activity stream. But because I have nothing to hide online I’ve set my
activity stream to public See the link below.

http://coolmel.zaadz.com/activity

This
means that I can easily plug the RSS feed of my activity stream into my
Tumblr stream. But the question is, do I like to do it? Alex Iskold took the words right out of my mouth:

"I
do not need an aggregator of my online presence because it makes no
sense. What I need is an aggregator of my soul that I can’t channel
elsewhere. This is what my Tumblr blog wil be."

Exactly!

But
once you have your "soul" aggregated, the next logical step is to find
a social "place" wherein your "greater level and depth of expression"
would be appreciated, compassionately critiqued, respected, and
celebrated. And that is the gap that we’re trying to fill in at Zaadz.

I think children look happier than adults. But adults are more
aware of their happiness, because they were exposed to unhappiness more
than most children. So, all things being equal, I’d say adults are
happier.

I use Firefox as my main application and the default page is the Firefox Start page which uses Google as a search engine.

But the first place I go online is actually Gmail. Why? Because my Zaadz
work email is set up with Gmail. The first thing I do when I wake up in
the morning is check my email to see if I have email from my team
members, or if there are some notifications and things I need to get
done on Zaadz.

From there I go to my Zaadz page
and check my zMail to see if I have some emails from members who need
help on the site. Then I check my Zaadz blog to see if anyone commented
on my blog posts. And then I check my friends’ activity page to see what my friends are up to and join in the conversations that interest me.

After that I check the news: NYTimes (email alert), Google News, and read my RSS feeds (from blogs) using Google Reader.

So that’s my start up routine.

As
you can see, I’m very dependent on Google and I’m literally logged in
to Zaadz the whole day, doing work and having fun at the same time

So my ideal home page would be a lot similar to iGoogle and Netvibes wherein I can add widget boxes containing the most frequent data I access (email, news, RSS feeds, etc) and especially data from my preferred social networking service, which is Zaadz. The services are already here. And with the arrival of Google’s OpenSocial,
things will get more interesting in the social networking arena. I
expect the Web to be more social than ever. That’s good news for our
growing community.

Case in point: Check out these bunch of developers gathered around a campfire talking about geeky stuff.

But speaking of home pages, I’m just too lazy to set it up. But now
that I’ve mentioned it, I better start customizing my iGoogle home page
so I can save some time clicking around.

Let me see… I met with my folks and relatives in
Chicago and we talked about a lot of deep-seated personal stuff. I’ve
learned to extend my patience and understanding to new levels and
accept things as they are. I’ve put the Serenity Prayer to practice.

And what do I hope for this November?

I’m excited with the launch of *GAIA(Beta) and I’m looking forward to another trip to Ireland to be with ~myDakini. If everything goes smoothly, I’ll be flying back home with her. Now this calls for another Serenity Prayer. Wish us luck, so that long distance suck no more…