We don’t want Snap to exist in a black box or ivory tower. We’re open to suggestions, complaints, ideas, and to general search-industry-related commentary. Help us to continue and improve our product by posting comments, links and ideas that will move our technology and the industry in a positive direction.

We do, however, have some simple guidelines for posting commentary on this Blog:

• Positive or negative opinions and posts are accepted. We welcome real people posting real commentary.
• We will not respond to anonymous Posters using aliases or handles.
• There is no swearing, inappropriate content or porn allowed.
• Abusive content or personal attacks won’t be tolerated, and will be removed immediately.
• This isn’t brain surgery, let’s have fun!

We reserves the right to delete postings and/or ban users if they violate these outlined terms. Please see our Terms & Conditions for more information.

People
Snap’s philosophy is that innovation in search is best achieved through an ongoing and open dialog with search users and advertisers. We don’t have a central spokesperson, but rather passionate employees who are encouraged to contribute to our company’s voice and image. We feel that by having many team members engaging with many of you we can learn more about user needs and actually do more in our field.

Each of our category editors has “volunteered” to help wrangle and manage the blog in the areas where they feel they can contribute to the discussion. Let us know what you think -- we’re listening.

Product, UI and Design

Jay Meydad
Vice President of Products
I am the Vice President of Product at Snap. I'll be blogging on our products and keep you updated on new features & enhancements as we release them.

Prior to joining Snap, I was Chief of Product for Spark Networks (online dating provider - JDate.com, AmericanSingles.com and others) where I oversaw product and design. Prior to Spark, I worked for AOL as Director of Account Management for ICQ Mobile.

Read my personal blog - http://www.meydad.com

Technology & Engineering

Mike Agostino
Chief Technology Officer

Adam Kangas
Software Engineer
Adam is a member of Snap's Search Technology team, and works on the behind-the-scenes magic of Snap products such as search and Snap Shots. A Computer Science graduate of nearby Harvey Mudd College, his interests include improvisational comedy and keeping up with the latest and greatest in new music.

Marketing

Paul Angles
Director of Marketing
Marketing Director, Snap Technologies, Inc.

Publishers Advocacy

Joe Sarmiento
Director of Sales and Business Development Manager
I manage the Sales and Business Development functions for Snap. Basically, what that means is I find advertisers for Snap, and work on getting more traffic for our advertisers on Snap. In the course of doing these functions, I get to talk to a lot of different people. I'll try to share best practices for advertisers here in the blog. I'll also keep you updated on new products and partnerships that affect our advertisers. Prior to coming to Snap, I was at Overture/Yahoo Search Marketing where I helped advertisers make sense of the first step in performance marketing, pay-per-click advertising. Snap is taking that concept to the next level with pay-per-action.

Idealab Family
Anything and everything relating to Idealab and/or any of its other funded companies. We are all about the digital community, so if we can speak about or to a subject or product that one of Idealabs other companies is involved in, we will.

Technology
So, what are the software platforms and tools we use to make Snap hum?

Prototype (Javascript Framework)
Prototype is a JavaScript framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.

Linux
Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Developed under the GNU General Public License , the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone.

WordPress
WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

K2 Theme (for WordPress)
K2 is a WordPress modification—an advanced template—created by Michael Heilemann and Chris J Davis, created as an improved Kubrick of sorts. It was built to make it an easy foundation for others to base their work on. And because it's free and open source, well you can do pretty much anything you want with it.

A short list of the Wordpress Plugins used on the Snap Blog...