We’ve been busy behind the scenes as we get everything ready for launch. Our days are getting longer and our nights are getting shorter, but we’re excited to be opening our doors in a couple of weeks. If you’d like o be among the first to receive an invite, please sign up here and we’ll notify you as soon as we can hand out entries.

In the meantime, we can’t talk much about the new features we’re planning, but we will be out and about in conferences giving demos. Next week we’ll be at the We Media conference at the University of Miami and will be glad to meet the participants and speakers that will be there. As a reminder, we’re sponsoring the conference and have a discount code if you’d still like to sign up.

After We Media we’ll be headed to Communitynext in Palo Alto and look forward to it very much. Noah Kagan and his team have done a great job organizing what looks to be a great event.

More informally, we’ll also be at the blogger dinner next Wednesday night. Seating is limited, so please be sure to sign up here if you’d like to join us.

Carlos, Mike and I enjoyed the January meeting of RefreshMiami. Monica Betancourt spoke about PR 2.0 and social media and then led a question and answer session. About 40 people showed up to the presentation, held at the UM School of Communication, and we’re encouraged by the good turnouts and conversations at these meetings, organized by Brian Breslin and Kim Grinfeder. Attached is a quick collage made with the previous version of Scrapblog. We’ll be presenting the new version at the next RefreshMiami meeting, which will be held together with BarcampMiami in late February.

So today we spent time having a few conversations with the internal team discussing our “higher purpose” and “mantra”. Guy Kawasaki encourages entrepreneurs to define a mantra. Tara Hunt talks about having a higher purpose as a common denominator among companies that successfully build communities around their products and services. Both concepts share the notion that corporate mission statements are obsolete.

After a short while there was consensus that our initial gut feeling is the way to go. You see, we started Scrapblog to allow everyday people to express themselves online in a creative way. We want to eliminate all the barriers to entry for you to be able to create richer online content than you ever thought possible. To do so, we have worked hard for over two years to make Scrapblog super easy to use. We think we are close, and we will make it available soon. Well, in the meantime, here is our mantra:

Democratize creative expression online

Please, comment and tell us what you think about it.

Tangler recently brought up the question “why did Flickr ‘win’?”. For Tara Hunt, a big part of the answer is they have “mojo“:

“Everyone [in the Flickr team] experienced the growth from a different perspective, but I believe that they all understand that a passionate team, working together towards a similar Higher Purpose, does what it does to get wherever it is that team is going. Furthermore, I conjecture that each of them understand that all of these elements working together, combined with the environmental factors they couldn’t control contributed towards that success.“

Factors they couldn’t control? Rather, we read this to mean that Ludicorp’s passion and drive in developing Flickr created the conditions for serendipity. They were attuned to how their community was using their application and made the necessary changes to please their users. Eric Costello, Client Development Lead for Flickr, said as much in an interview with Adaptive Path, when he mentioned how they changed their initial concept of Game Neverending to better suit what their users wanted:

“It wasn’t a photo sharing site, so much as it was a place where you could go to chat and talk about photos. But none of that activity was stored in any asynchronous way – there were no Web pages that hosted the conversations people were having about photos, it was all just real-time.

We wanted to extend that into the Web, so that everything that could be done in the Flash chat environment could be done on the site itself. User feedback also drove a lot of the decisions about features. We had user forums very early on and people told us what they wanted.“

For years to come, we will be dissecting the key factors of success for Flickr and other sites. But fundamentally, we believe people love to share experiences with their family, friends, community or the whole world. The growth of photo- and video-sharing sites tells us as much.

Our goal is to help you do so by opening a space where you can create stunning multimedia scrapbooks featuring photos, videos, audio and a bunch of other creative elements. But we will be open to your suggestions on how to make this space the most welcoming, easy to use and comfortable one for all.

And the more we can help you ‘kick ass’, the better we’re doing our job.

Technorati Tags: flickr, tangler, scrapblog, serendipity, social

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I just read Hugh Macleod’s manifesto on “How to be Creative” (free download). Read it and it will boost your confidence in your ability to innovate. Plus, it is quick read (about 1hr).

While on the subject of reading… I’ve read many books and many of them have changed me by expanding my mind’s reach. The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman validated my thoughts about outsourcing and encouraged me to establish relationships with developers in India, Russia and New Zealand. Getting Real and Defensive Design by Jason Fried made me more user-centric when designing the interactions in Scrapblog. Winning by Jack & Suzy Welch and Authentic Leadership by Bill George taught me than being candid in every situation not only makes you a better person, but a better manager and ultimately someone that others will trust and want to follow. Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start made me ignore the rhetoric and define simple mantras for my businesses. Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing and Unleashing the Ideavirus opened my mind to the importance of connecting with consumers, but Cluetrain Manifesto taught me that being part of the community is more efficient than studying your market. Naked Conversations and meeting Shel made me a blogger (yee thanks!). But looking at my younger years there were two books that prepared me for everything else. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) by Calderon de la Barca. These last two books made me realize that to achieve success you must continue dreaming but put a lot of effort into living your dreams.

Tell me… what have you read lately that has changed you?