The startup I work at, Fanzter, Inc., is looking for interns. These positions can be full- or part-time, paid. If you know anyone who loves celebrities, fashion, and products and wants to get paid to read People, Us Weekly, TMZ, and PopSugar and help out Coolspotters, have them send their resume in to jobs@fanzter.com. All we ask for is enthusiasm and someone that enjoys being online.

You can find more information on all the available positions at the Fanzter jobs page and on the post I just put up at the Coolspotters blog.

Also, though it’s not part of the official job description, we’re willing to consider more flexible opportunities for high school students who might not have a car or whatever. For example, we could do unpaid but include a letter/recommendation for college apps, etc. If you have an idea, propose it, too. No guarantees, but we can be flexible.

Email resumes and a short note to jobs -at- fanzter -dot- com. Fanzter is located in Collinsville, CT, which is west of Hartford.

I saw Charlie Brooker’s Guardian piece, Supposing … I’m too old for MySpace, on both digg and on techmeme so I had to go read it.

As a fellow 30+ geek who doesn’t use MySpace, I feel the need to chime in. Especially since I’m building a social networking site at work. More on that in a minute.

The reason Brooker feels like he’s “a fumbling old colonel struggling to comprehend his nephew’s digital watch” is that he keeps thinking there’s a hook there, something that ought to appeal to him that doesn’t. The underlying implication is that as a good geek, he should see the draw of MySpace.

There are a couple of fundamental mistakes here. The first is that MySpace has something to do with geekdom and, by extension, technology. It has absolutely nothing to do with either. It has to do with the age group of those that use it and where they are in life. The New Yorker (Me Media, 5/15/06 issue) had one of the best explanations. They talked to a sociologist who believes being on MySpace is the modern alternative to hanging out at the mall for kids. Whatever the manifestation, kids and young adults need to see and be seen and to socialize. MySpace is about how younger people socialize and make friends.

For those of us past this stage of life, whatever our age, MySpace isn’t for us. A 30-year-old would probably feel as out-of-place just hanging out at the mall. Not that you can’t go to MySpace, see bands, get tickets, or whatever. You can still go to the mall. You just don’t hang out there.

The way to build a MySpace for older Internet users is to figure out what types of things adults are interested in having aggregated about them. If you have kids, for example, you might take more pictures of the kids than you do of yourself or your spouse. It might be a subtle difference, but it requires a few different features. I think a lot of different sites have a lot of the pieces, but the grown-up’s social networking site will have all of this functionality in one place.

The second misconception is that MySpace is the “be all, end all” for social networking. Because he doesn’t get MySpace, he must not get the whole social networking “thing.” That seems too simplistic. Sure, the core functionality is fairly common. Friendster, Facebook, Flickr, or LinkedIn all provide the same basic functionality. Adding friends, self-expression, and sharing are really all these sites are about. It’s a personal aggregator of things about you, and in that way, it’s pretty simple. It’s not the technology that sets them apart but the features and the product. “What do you share?” and “Why do you share it?” make all the difference. MySpace has done some smart things on that front which is why they’re so popular. Danah Boyd’s essay examines some of this, by the way, and is a great set of guiding principles for those of us building competitors.

I mentioned above that we’re building a social networking platform at ESPN.com. There is a team of folks here at ESPN.com including a number of folks in senior management who get this stuff. We see some things that we know we can do better than anyone else, so in September, we will launch our new social networking platform. Our plan is to bring out the basics then. Over the following months, you’ll see new features roll out that will make the ESPN.com offering even better.

This is one of the major projects my team is working on right now. I can’t really talk about the features in more detail, but here’s the summary of the September feature set from the Ad Age article:

ESPN is hoping to become the MySpace of the sports world. In September, it will unveil as part of ESPN’s Sports Nation property the tools for fans to create profiles, contribute to sports blogs, post opinions and link to favorite articles.

John Zaccario, VP-digital media sales and marketing at ESPN, revealed the plans to advertisers at a pre-NBA Draft party in Chelsea that also featured an appearance by NBA great (and ESPN basketball analyst) Bill Walton. “We want to make the sports fan the center of ESPN’s universe,” Mr. Zaccari said. ESPN will allow users to personalize their home pages and participate in blogs and discussions around favorite teams and sports.

There are some more features, but this is the general idea for the September launch. Even more features will roll out over the following months. I’m really excited to see how people use the site, and it should be fun to see where the fans take us.

I actually think the headline of the Ad Age article is wrong, by the way. The only way my team wants to be “MySpace for fans” is in our overall audience. Can’t complain about having 50-60+ million uniques, after all. Beyond the basics, though, we’re going to be very different and, I believe, a lot better. We’re very aware that people of all ages are sports fans whether they’re in the heavily courted 18-35 demo or not. We’re doing what we can to appeal to sports fans of all ages whether you’re in the MySpace crowd or not.

I don’t think Brooker will have trouble getting ESPN’s offering, especially if he’s a sports fan.

Want a job?

We still have some openings on this team, by the way, and if you get MySpace and you get sports and you’re a web developer either on the front end (DHTML, JS, PHP/JSP/ASP, AJAX, etc.) or the back end (SQL, Java, C#, etc.), send us your resume. The job description I linked to is for a particular position, but you can find the other open technology positions on our jobs web site. ESPN is an awesome place to work if you love sports.

(Note: Standard disclaimer applies. I work for ESPN, but I’m writing here on my own. Nothing has been approved or sanctioned by anyone at ESPN.com or Disney.)

Saw this over at Kareem’s place: The New York Times is looking for a Creative Technologist. Kareem’s right: this sounds like an awesome position.

The New York Times Company’s new Research and Development unit is looking for a unique individual to serve as a Creative Technologist. S/he will be highly creative and have the hands-on ability develop Internet software applications that integrate with consumer devices. We are looking for someone with an innate curiosity and a passion for innovation; someone who is filled with inventive new ideas, and who has the ability single-handedly to render these ideas into working models. The ideal candidate will also have the ability to communicate complex technological concepts into plain language for non-technical people.

Hey, that’s me! Considering my resume says, “I am a technologist at heart,” well…. if ESPN.com would just create this position, I’d be right there… though my new gig is pretty good.

I was at an MIT job fair yesterday in Cambridge. We met a lot great students while looking to fill several open positions and internships in the Technology group. It was a pretty typical job fair for us, except for one thing. Nearly every student that sopped by asked “What is ESPN doing here at MIT?”

I was pretty surprised at the number of times we got that question. Some of the students seemed to believe that few MIT students would be sports fans (I think they’re wrong, of course). Even more students, though, thought that we were out there trying to recruit folks for the television broadcasting side and didn’t know why we’d be looking at MIT. Even once we explained that we were there for ESPN.com, people still thought we were looking for athletes and sports people over technology folks.

I shouldn’t have been surprised because, well, ESPN’s brand is all about sports. Which is too bad, because ESPN.com is a serious technology shop. ESPN.com (and the Walt Disney Internet Group) build, maintain, and enhance nearly our entire application stack. From the application servers to the caching technology to our streaming update technology, WDIG/ESPN.com engineers maintain and write it all. There’s a strong technology foundation here that rivals the other big sites.

We also have the traffic, obviously, that measures up to the other big sites out there. Working here is a great way to deal with crazy problems like how to let a million people update their fantasy rosters in the same 15 minute period. Or, how to serve the millions of people checking their brackets during March Madness.

Don’t get me wrong. Disney and ESPN are both content companies first. We’re not Yahoo or Amazon or Google. What we are, though, is a platform with a big, mainstream audience. When the next big media thing happens, it’s going to happen here, where we have the mainstream audience and the compelling content to bring them in.

All of this is my long way of saying that if you’re a technology geek and a sports fan, you really ought to work here. We’re hiring for a number of open positions at varying levels of experience. My team is looking for really good engineers that can be comfortable parsing data feeds from our outside providers as well as working on tweaking asynchronous I/O behavior inside our servlet container. If you live technology and you live sports, click on over to ESPN’s job web site to see the open positions in the technology group. If you have any questions, you can leave comments here (fill out your email address, don’t worry it won’t show up on the site).