I’m on vacation in Austin, Texas this week with my family but I thought I’d check-in to share the great news.

Our small team at Lookery is growing quickly and I am very happy to announce that Jay Meattle will be joining us next week.

This is Jay’s last week at Compete where he and I worked together for over 3 years. While at Compete Jay was the Product Manager for Compete.com and part of the small team responsible for creating it. Jay and I also worked together creating Bzzster.com and Shareaholic as our weekend projects while at Compete.

At Lookery Jay will be heading up Product Development for us and helping us launch some of the very exciting products we’ve been heads-down working on.

Looking forward to “bringing the thunder” at Lookery with Jay.

Awesome! The Shareaholic Firefox Extension that Jay and I created for Bzzster.com (almost all Jay) was just named a Grand Prize Winner in Mozilla’s Extend Firefox 2 contest.

The Shareholic extension lets you submit any web page to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service. Including:

• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Facebook
• Bzzster
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Tumblr
• and many more…

Big thanks to the contest judges: Garrett Camp (StumbleUpon), Brendan Eich (Mozilla), Jesse James Garrett (Adaptive Path), Tariq Krim (NetVibes), and Joshua Schachter (del.ico.us) and the contest sponsors.

Jay has some really great future features coming. It’s time to innovate quickly now that so many are copying us. I’m looking at you Mahalo Share.


Install the Shareholic Extension

If you know me then you know I like to email interesting stuff I find out on the INTERNETS.

Early this year my link emailing really got out of control and I had no choice but to create an app to streamline the process. Having all my recommendations in one central location was a bonus. This spring Jay and I launched Bzzster just to “scratch our own itch“.

Since launching Bzzster Jay and I have each emailed over 1000 links to friends via Bzzster. What’s been surprising though is how many people have found it and use it everyday. Although I haven’t had much time recently (see Lookery) to work on Bzzster Jay has been pushing things along nicely.

A few months ago Jay created a firefox extension named Shareholic. Shareholic makes sharing with Bzzster easier plus it adds a bunch of other sharing options including Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us.

Jay just updated Shareholic last week with a bunch of new features and a brand new icon. We were using the common share icon for the extension but ran into some copyright issues since the project was acquired by the Share This guys.

Let me know how we can improve Shareaholic and Bzzster

P.S. Be careful with that Share Icon on your blog…