This is a fun release, we’re quite happy with it. No huge new features, but we love the result. So here what’s new in this release:

• The trip Cover page got a makeover (check it out here). Not only does it look better, it also makes it easier to see what a trip is about.
• Much improved friend-finder, check it out on your Find Friends or Friends pages. You can now lookup your friends on Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, LinkedIn, and many others.
• Added a picture control panel right in the Slideshow, so you can easily delete or rotate pictures without having to open the picture details dialog. Very convenient.
• We now have a set of cute request icons right on the Home page. It makes it easier to tell what the request is all about.
• Even faster loading pages, just when we thought we couldn’t be any faster
• And as always we’ve addressed a large number of feedbacks, too long to mention here.

Eye candy

The same story in pictures:

Flashy new trip Cover page

Improved friend-finder

Slideshow picture control panel

Request icons

We’re already hard at work on the next batch of features which should hit production in about a week.

What’s new in this release:

• Trip-level privacy controls: as promised last time, we managed to get this into this release! More on this below.
• Improved My Friends page with listing of people you may know and ability to import contacts anytime.
• Redesigned My Trips page, including a nice new page for the case when there are no trips to display.
• Redesigned all of the request bubbles using larger picture, fonts, and buttons. Much nicer to look at.
• In picture details we moved the search area to the left-hand side of the screen. This means larger area to display the pictures in, less redrawing when you move between pictures.
• Smarter listing of pictures, such as when picking your profile picture or the trip cover. We make better use of the available real-estate, and use a more intuitive listing on screen.
• Fast feedback whenever you invite someone to become your friend.
• Darker bubbles for better contrast, easier on the eyes.
• Lots of internal work to make things cleaner, meaner, and faster.
• And last but not least, we addressed another bunch of feedbacks from our users.

Trip level privacy

As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, we now have trip-level privacy controls. This brings the privacy on Zipalong to a pretty good level of granularity.

Here is the obligatory screenshot of trip the privacy controls:

By default your trip will have Default visibility, which means that it inherits your profile setting with the added twist that participants always have access to the trip.

You can now change this setting to one of: Participants only, Friends only, Members only, and Public, independent of your profile setting. Marking the trip Public opens it up to be indexed by Google.

It is worth noting here that trip participants always get access to the trip even if you mark it Friends only and they are not friends with you.

Eye candy

So before I go, here are a couple of screenshots of the redesigned pages (My Trips and My Friends):

What’s new in this release:

• Suggest friends to other Zipalong users (more below).
• Improved the Find Friends page to clearly separate the users that we find based on the contacts you import from the ones we guess based on other sources.
• We added a link called How do I look? closed to your picture profile which takes you to your own profile page, as seen by other users. We discovered that a lot of users wanted to get to it, and they had to go through hoops to do it. Now it’s just a click away.
• User names are now abbreviated a lot nicer when they don’t fit in the alloted space (e.g. Dimi Paun will become Dimi P. or Dimi depending on the available space).
• More work on improving the load speed, we like snappy sites as much as anybody. We already do quite a bit in terms optimizing the browsing experience, but we always try to do better.
• Lots of feedbacks from our users where addressed.

Suggest Friends

The new feature this release is the ability to suggest friends to other users. To do so, you just select a few users from your own list of friends and send them to the other user:

How do you get to do so? There are two ways:

• When you approve a new friend, you will be prompted automatically to suggest new friends if it makes sense. This is a great way to help others to get started and connect with other people on Zipalong.
• You can just go to someone’s profile page, where you will find a Suggest friends link (on both the main profile page and the profile friends page).

And since we went all out with screenshots, here is a quick shot of the new link to your profile page:

Plans

So what’s next? We hope to have trip-level privacy settings and a revamped My Friends page in the next release, scheduled for the week of Nov 10, 2008.

Just 10 short days from the previous release…

What’s new in this release:

• Privacy control, as promised last time. We are rather excited about this feature, as it has been requested by many of our users. More on this below.
• Importing of your contacts from other online services such as Google, or MSN, all nicely integrated in the welcome pages. We will make this feature available to existing users shortly.
• Enhanced invite dialog, with full history of your emails (including the ones imported with your contacts) and status of already invited people (screenshot below).
• Improved “My Friends” page for people that have not yet connected as friends with anyone on Zipalong. It makes it straightforward for the user to get started with their friends.
• Confirmation emails are now being sent via email when your friendship invite or trip join request is approved. So that you know.
• No longer change the map zoom level when centering the map on a picture, place, landmark, or note. It was an interesting idea to remember the zoom level the marker was placed at, but it ended up confusing people that didn’t know about it.
• And as always, a few bugs reported by some of our users got what they deserved.

This is the new invite dialog, with a contact highlighted in yellow to denote that he/she has already been invited.

Also, we now keep track of your contacts’ name, shown here in white.

Privacy

This is the first batch of privacy-related changes. It allows (as shown in the screenshot above) to change your account settings between Friends only, Member only, and Public.

By default your account has Members only visibility, which means that only Zipalong members can view your friends and your trips. If that is too loose for your taste, change it to Friends only. If you would like Google to index your account, change the privacy setting to Public.

Your trips automatically inherit your account privacy setting, with the additional feature of always being available to the other trip participants as well (regardless if they are your friends or not).

We are working on more granular privacy controls at the trip and picture level, and hope to land these feature in the next release (fingers crossed!).

For the last two weeks we’ve been hard at work giving Zipalong a much needed make-over! The first installment of this effort saw the light of day Tue morning, on Oct 14, 2008.

What’s new in this release:

• The user Profile page, and his or her Trips and Friends pages were totally redesigned from the ground up: nicer to look at, easier to read, faster to load and navigate. Pretty cool are the new Travel buddies left column on the Trips page, and the new XYZ says left column on the Profile page
• Zipalong now uses differently sized icons for users, trips, pictures, etc, so you can more easily tell the difference between them
• People you invite to the site directly or to join one of your trips are greeted by a slick welcome screen, are given a much easier “landing” on the site, with short, helpful messages along the way. As a bonus, they can now use their Facebook account to join the site
• The old welcome pages have been replaced by a simpler, nicer welcome page
• The trip Cover page now loads significantly faster. We love a speedy site, and we are always trying to make Zipalong load and feel faster

We hope you enjoy the changes, but even if you hate them, we’d like to hear from you. Just use the “feedback” link found in the top-right corner of every page.