Zipalong has a comprehensive and flexible privacy system that is simple and intuitive to use.

You can customize the privacy settings of your trips and pictures as much as you like. For example you can set your trips and pictures to be viewable only by your friends with one simple step.

What if you have a trip that you’re really proud of, and you want everybody to see it? Nothing simpler: just make that one trip public. You have some pictures in that trip that you want to keep private? Again, just set the picture privacy level of each picture to a level you feel comfortable with.

Good, but what if you want to show a trip to someone who is not your friend? Just send him or her a trip share. Can they request access to my private trip? Of course they can!

The nitty-gritty

So if you’re interested in the technical details of how all this works read on.

To understand privacy we need to explain a bit the hierarchy of the various entities used on Zipalong. The top most entity would be the user profile. The user profile contains one or more trips which in turn contain an itinerary, journals entries, and pictures. You can control the privacy setting at each of the three levels.

The profile privacy is accessible through the settings link on your home page. It has three levels:

• friends only - your profile can be accessed only by your friends
• members only - your profile can be accessed only by Zipalong members
• public - your profile is public, indexable by Google

The trip privacy is accessible on the trip cover tab, under the settings link. It has five levels:

• default - meaning it inherits your profile privacy setting
• participants - the trip can be viewed only by trip participants
• friends - the trip can be viewed only by your friends
• members - the trip can be viewed by all Zipalong members
• public - trip is public, indexable by Google

The picture privacy is available on the picture details bubble. It has six levels:

• default - meaning it inherits your trip level setting
• private - nobody but you can access this picture
• participants - the picture can be viewed only by trip participants
• friends - the picture can be viewed only by your friends
• members - the picture can be viewed by all Zipalong members
• public - picture is public, indexable by Google

It is key that the same hierarchy that we identified for the entities above applies for the privacy levels. Therefore, the profile privacy level will be inherited by the trip privacy level, and the trip privacy level will be inherited by the picture privacy level. So if you set the profile privacy level at friends only, automatically all your trips and pictures will only be available to your friends.

This release has been in the works for 3 weeks, but thankfully there’s the holidays, shopping, and partying to blame it on…

What’s new this release:

• Trip embeddability: build your trips on Zipalong and then include them in other web pages, such as your blog. More on this below.
• The newsfeed is now filtered correctly based on the privacy settings of the items listed in the feed, even for news from the past.
• You can now change your email from the account settings dialog, if you so desire.
• We’ve added the ability to rotate a picture to the left too, as rotating a picture 3 times to obtain the same effect is sort of annoying.
• New users can get in the site without having to first confirm their email. Instant gratification is not all that bad…
• People with multiple accounts can now merge the accounts during the sign-up process. This is particularly handy if you created an account when you signed up using your Facebook account, and then decided to create another one using a regular email address.
• And last but not least, quite a few feedbacks have been addressed.

Trip Embeddability

You can now embed trips that you build on Zipalong in other pages, just like you embed Youtube videos. The eye-candy should tell the rest of the story:

You click the “Embed” link:

Copy the HTML snippet:

And once you embed it in the page, you get something like so (this is what you get from clicking the “See a demo” link from the above dialog):

Default account email

You can now change it (but you can also use the old one to login to Zipalong). Here’s how to do it:

Feedbacks

We’ve received a lot of good feedbacks lately, and we are hard at work implementing some of the good ideas that were suggested, so stay tuned!

What’s new this release:

• Re-design of the Home page! New users will also see a much improved version of this page.
• My Friends and My Trips have also got a minor facelift to keep up with the new Home.
• Access passes to private trips. Now users can request permission to see a trip otherwise private. More below.
• Privatized trip names. By popular demand you can now hide even the trip name for really secret trips.
• Trips are now smarter and can infer the start/end of the trip automagically from the dates you enter in the itinerary.
• Requests that pertain to a trip are now distributed to all editors, not just the owner as before, so that everybody can pitch in.
• The first version of the itinerary flyby (a.k.a trip animation) is out!
• And last but not least more feedbacks have been addressed.

Access passes

Here is the obligatory eye-candy detailing how you can request a pass to a trip:

We are very excited about this release, we hope you’ll enjoy it too. We have big plans for the immediate future, so stay tuned!

Hi folks,

This is a big release for us, as it brings quite a few changes requested in the last little while. The big items are an upload process that’s a lot more user friendly, and the completion of privacy-related work started some time ago.

What’s new in this release:

• Picture-level privacy controls: you can now control the privacy setting on each individual picture. More on this below.
• Totally redesigned upload process: you can now upload directly from the My Trips page without having to first go into a trip.
• A new upload quality setting: folks that prefer larger, better looking pictures can now use the ‘optimal upload’ setting during the upload. This setting strikes a better balance between speed and quality if you have a fast internet connection.
• Faster than a greased weasel: we’ve made changes throughout the site to make it even faster to load. In particular the picture details dialog should feel lighter now.
• The picture tagging, picture upload, and trip join request dialogs have been reworked. They are officially sweet!
• You can now attach a message when uploading pictures into a trip where you are not a participant. It makes it easier for the recipient to understand what’s going on with the pictures you’ve sent.
• If you change the trip description several times in a row (e.g. fixing spelling mistakes), it will no longer clutter people’s news feeds with several messages.
• As always, quite a few of the feedbacks from our users have been addressed, and several rendering problems in IE6 have been fixed.

Picture level privacy

We now have picture-level privacy controls. This brings the privacy on Zipalong to a very good level of granularity that should please most users.

Here is a screenshot of the actual UI:

By default your pictures will have Default visibility, which means that it inherits the trip privacy setting. You can now change this to one of: Participants only, Friends only, Members only, and Public, independent of your trip setting. Marking the picture Public opens it up to be indexed by Google.

Upload quality

It turns out that some people like really fast uploads, others prefer larger, higher quality pictures. Since you can’t have both, you can now choose the one that’s right for you.

That is, you now have a choice between the already existing Fast upload, and the brand new Optimal upload:

The Fast upload gives you Facebook-like upload speed (at a bit better quality!), while the Optimal upload is similar to Flickr in terms of speed/quality balance.

You can of course still upload using Full upload to get your photos online at their original size/quality, but it is not really practical at today’s upload speeds if you have hundreds of photos to upload (e.g if you have a 7 mega-pixel camera it can take a few hours to upload 200 hundred pictures).

We recommend the Optimal upload, as it provides very good quality (in fact, as good as Full upload for online viewing) and fast upload speed.

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):

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!).