Anyhow, so about a few months ago I took upon myself to offer people in my team some longer term career advice as a part of their annual performance review discussions. As most of the  industries are going through shakeouts, various rounds of layoffs are happening everywhere and hence people are going through a phase of self discovery, I thought it might be worthwhile to share some of that here.

The question I like to address is, what do you want to pursue? I frequently run into this question in the form of “how to manage your career”, “what should be my next steps”, “how do I plan ahead for longer term career growth” etc. In my personal opinion a lot of it boils down to determining what you want to pursue, because the sooner you figure that out the faster you’ll be able to get it (if you work on it with discipline:):

1. Pursue what you want to “truly” do: This is your true north, the vertical or horizontal area where your passion lies. How to figure that out is a completely different discussion but it varies a lot from people to people on how they define that, some people “know” it forever while some people “never know” it. But in all cases, it should always be determined by “your core values”. One good exercise is to write-down what you are passionate about currently and then setting 3-5 year direction based on that. For example someone can say I want to build new products to meet needs of bottom-of-pyramid users in Africa, someone else can be more generic and say I want to be the best salesman etc

2. Pursue higher impact: This is your impact on your family/team/company/industry/society/village/city/world etc, what ever is your current context & focus (which can change based on your views)

3. Pursue new learning

If you pursue these three with full energy then as a corollary two other things:

1. Compensation

2. Career-growth/position

will automatically take care of themselves (and overall sense of satisfaction).

So you should be asking yourself every year (IMO when you get to annual introspective review or annual company performance review) in hindsight and for the next year; whether you are on the right boat & whether you are heading in the right direction. Make sure you write down if this year; whether you did what you want to do? whether you made an impact, where you want to? whether you learned something new?. And then write down, what you want to do as next steps in all three areas of pursuit.

Try it out and let me know if it works.

What Overture first and more famously Google next did by capturing intent of the user and turning it into a huge cash cow is stuff for the legends now. But I believe that the same dynamic of ‘caturing intent and converting to $’ is yet to play out completely on the web (actually it is far from that). What we have seen is one great example (of Google) and it is my belief that there are many more to come.

Take for example twitter. It is a place where millions of users express thier intent billions of times a month. That is where the monetization would come from. The company has already started capturing intent and now figuring out ways of putting analytics and discovery on top of it. First step is the search/content-discovery functionality. It would help the company in identifying/classifying/slicing-dicing intent and then once that intelligence exists, it can be monetized easily.

Another classic example of users expressing intent is when they make comments/ratings/recommendations on different assets on the web. Till now it was very hard to cature that intent in a centralized way. But with the advent of facebook connect etc kind of functionality PLUS Open ID that let you carry your identity and social graph on the web we have a beginning of potentially consolidating and capturing that intent as well.

I am sure there are many more examples and as more platformization happens on the web we’ll see more interesting ways of capturing, consolodating and monetizing user intent.

1. The Alchemist: What comes to mind: Really boring stuff. Why did I ever read a fiction book again?

2. Shantaram: What comes to mind: AWESOME. Best book I read in 08. Wanna go to Leopolds Cafe in Bombay.

3. Black Boy: What comes to mind: Huge appreciation for what Obama has achieved given how America was only about 60 years ago.

4. How Starbucks Saved My Life: What comes to mind: Not a really well written book that focused too much on going back and forth instead of getting on with it.

5. The Grass Is Singing: What comes to mind: Overall boring fiction stuff that was last nail in the coffin to keep me away from novels for a looong time.

6. Infidel: What comes to mind: really cool book. Helps me understand how difficult things can be for some ppl…so stop complaining & be positive
7. Outliers: What comes to mind: really enjoyable read with some key takeaways on 10000 hr practice, emotional intelligence, structured upbringing for kids etc. but the more imp thing is that it was a fun read.

8. Three Cups of Tea: What comes to mind: One man can really make a difference. Power of One.
9. The Last Lecture: What comes to mind: i am an ass for not taking his class while at CMU. big regret.

10. Once You are Lucky, Twice You are Good: What comes to mind: complete waste of time.

From a user perspective a problem is that I have my social graphs in multiple places already but still I am not able to share all my “stuff” with the right people.

I think the solution to both these issues is the ability to “carry your community with you” on the web. This means I should be able to have my social graph being available on the apps I use on the web. The good news is that this is already emerging as an important trend on the web with social networks actually offering services that enable social-graphs to be exported outside the walled-gardens of their sites and on to other useful applications on the web. The recent announcement by facebook about “facebook connect” is one of such moves.

This trend is the next step in evolution of utility of social networks on the web. First, by having applications available INSIDE the social network context, these networks made user experience more compelling and convenient for users and increased the utility of networks themselves. And now, these networks are going OUTSIDE their walls to use their value prop of having existing social graphs to add value to other apps on the web. I think of it as “distributing the social graph utility”, if you will.

Besides the obvious impact of such a move (and this is not isolated move, other major players are also doing the same) for social networks, I think it also has potential to have a more profound impact on the life of new product developers and entrepreneurs I mentioned above. Now they can focus on doing a great job at solving the user problem they are building their apps for rather than investing time in resolving the problem of creating a social graph in a hyper-social-networked world we live in. From a technical perspective the social graph can now just be an API.

Moreover I believe this is just a first step and a more powerful concept that would emerge is “contextual-social-graphs-on-the-go”. This is best explained by an example. Imagine if you have 100 “friends” in your social graph and if you go to business section of new york times, your business savvy friends “surface” whereas if you go to NBA section of yahoo! sports your hoops savvy friends surface. This would be very useful and enable you to connect/share/communicate very efficiently with the right people at the right time.

Besides this product development innovation it would be interesting to see how it impacts the monetization (or lack of it) of social networks.

Summary:

Overall the trend of making available social graph outside social networking sites is important for social neworks as well apps on the web. It is still early days but more powerful patterns would emerge using this as a base. Monetization still remains open issue.

This makes me think that how would Blockbuster – being an established player in movie-rental market – continue to catch up to Netflix – the new player.

If you see what has happened in this market, Netflix came in and completely shook up the market with DVD-in-mail. That was an example of innovation disrupting an established market. Blockbuster eventually caught up and started it’s own similar service and used it’s physical retail presence to it’s advantage. They were also forced to introduce features like no late fees. All of this to the customer’s advantage. Blockbuster’s response was an example of an established player catching up to innovation from a nimble new player and significantly impacting it’s business model.

What this story makes me think is that Netflix would continue to out-innovate a large company (for a while) because it is a smaller, more nimble & NEW player. It doesn’t come with the baggage of all things that make Blockbuster an old established company in it’s industry, the business units, the silos, the organization structure etc. It is a classic example that a big company would mostly struggle to out-innovate the new player.

In a traditional brick-and-mortar business like movie-rental, the story of Netflix vs. Blockbuster captures the imagination of mass media (and mine too). In my business of technology and specifically Internet, this happens every single day. We see new players coming in with no-baggage and freely innovating in the proverbial garages, and more established companies struggling with their “innovation-programs” to play catch up. It is one of the most intriguing issues to me in business and we’ll see how it plays out in the movie-rental market.