Fast forward almost three months later, I now spend about two hours every month on news when I’m at my laptop. I also spend, probably, another hour or so on my iPad, but I can’t really track that without RescueTime. I haven’t saved a lot of time (and that wasn’t the point, anyway), but I find that my days are much more productive because there’s less noise, less news, less procrastination going on.

I’ve also discovered Flipboard (I know, I’m kinda late to the party), a brilliant iPad app that makes it incredibly easy to go through my only news sources at the moment: The Economist, The New Yorker, Hacker News and TechMeme. Each morning, while I have breakfast, I flip through the sources and click on the articles that seem of interest. The whole process usually takes about five minutes and I’ve realised that the most important bits of news usually surface to the top.

Now, there’s another thing that’s been bugging me lately and I even blogged about it awhile ago. I think Facebook is, mostly, a waste of time. So in February, I’m going to try another little experiment: only visit Facebook on weekends. I wonder how that’s gonna go.

The outcome of the trip has exceeded all my expectations. After spending four days with the team deep in the Carpathian mountains, not only is everyone aware of and aligned to one big objective, but we’ve set goals for each member of the team and prepared a detailed product roadmap. In other words, we know where we’re going and how to get there. And we also had lots of fun along the way. I strongly recommend that you try it for your startup, regardless of whether you’re five people or fifty. And here are a few tips to help you get started:

Go somewhere remote. It will help the team mentally disconnect from the day-to-day stuff. We chose to rent an entire cottage up in the Carpathian mountains in Romania. All we had was an internet connection, our laptops and a whiteboard. Living and working under the same roof for a few days can create incredibly tight bonds within the team.

Set a clear outcome and keep a tight schedule. Each day, we had at least 4 hours of discussions on a predefined agenda. We had a different theme each day: strategy, BrainRolls, BrainAds and objective planning / product roadmap. Our plan was to align the whole team to the same objective and make sure everyone has defined their goals for the year and for the first quarter of 2012.

Use a planning methodology. It makes it a lot easier to plan things out and align everyone to one objective. At Brainient, we use OKRP (Objectives and Key Results Planning), a methodology used by the likes of Zynga, Facebook and Google. Here’s how Google does OKRs, for example.

Have fun. Product planning and brainstorming can be tiring, so we made sure we had lots of fun prepared. From trips to the mountains to barbecues, Texas Hold ‘em, four on the couch or pushing our cars out of the snow upon departure, it felt more like a fun camp in the mountains than an intense company planning trip.

It’s a very comforting thought for a founder / CEO to know that every single member of the team knows what they have to achieve, and I can’t thing of a better and faster way to do it than the Steve Jobs way.

Sabina and Peter Ward are now friends after both attending Langer & Wardy’s fancy dress & pool party birthday extravaganza.

Now, Sabina met Pete some time ago, but after seeing him at Langer’s party the night before she decided to connect online as well. Facebook very intelligently (albeit wrongly this time) guessed that they might have met at the party. Which is scary. Not because of this particular harmless association, but because it points towards how much effort Zuck and the team put into making use of every single bit of data they have about us.

I guess it’s all fine when you voluntarily decide what you’re going to share. The problem, however, is that Facebook’s newest open graph protocol enables app developers to share anything we do in their apps, automatically, in the background. For example, every now and then I entertain myself with a bit of Justin Bieber, which is what I wanted to do this morning on Spotify. Luckily, I remembered that everything I do in Spotify is now automatically posted on my Facebook Wall (and Timeline) – right before pressing play (so I didn’t). I wouldn’t have minded the banter and pokes I would’ve gotten from my friends for doing such an atrocity, but I would go crazy if Facebook started inviting me to Justin Bieber concerts in London. Now THAT would be scary (not to mention stupid) so I’m starting to wonder if the new open graph protocol is such a good idea after all.

However, I think trendspotting is incredibly difficult but pays off massively, if you manage to have the right team and the right product at the right time. Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital makes a similar point in a speech he had at Stanford a few months ago:

We have always focused on the market: the size, the dynamics and the nature of the competition. Because our objective always was to build big companies. If you don’t attack a big market, it’s highly unlikely you’re ever going to build a big company.

We don’t care if people went to school or how smart they are. We are interested in their idea about the market, the magnitude of the problem and what can happen if in fact the combination of Sequoia and the individuals are correct.

We don’t choose people, we choose markets. And once we choose a market, we choose the best product in the market.

I strongly recommend that you watch the entire speech (about 1hr long), when you get a chance:

Facebook is right in the midst of all this drama with its share-everything privacy policy and Zuckerberg’s recent “newly discovered” IM messages.

But here’s my take on it: Facebook will make $1 billion this year, and they’ll probably IPO in 2012. Right now, investors trust Zuck and his team and users need Facebook enough to be willing to go through the roller coaster together with the company. And Zuck knows that.

Think about the following scenario: Mark Zuckerberg’s IM message is discovered after their IPO. What happens to the stock? It goes down. Or, Facebook changes their privacy policies and makes tons of changes that users hate. What happens to the stock? It goes down. Or… well, you get the point.

Facebook has two more years to bang its head on the wall and try everything possible without that affecting their ‘market cap’. Once they float, they will have to be 100 times more careful. So it makes sense for them to try it and then ask for forgiveness. And Zuck’s doing just that.

Even more, the lad’s even commenting and adding friends with that account, so he’s into some serious business .

Thanks dude, you’ve made my day!