Coming up for air this week. Uploading functionality and member profiles have grown leaps and bounds. Very happy with where things are going and I think our users are going to enjoy having a profile that puts everything in one place. BUT, we’ve already come up with a really exciting new way to let members truly control their space. I can’t get it into the ’system’ until we’ve launched though, so I’m calling it Zoopy 2.0 and have locked it away in a Top Secret drawer. Can’t wait to let it out.

But anyway, been reading some very interesting stats regarding the average social networking citizen. Obviously no stats for SA (yet) but international trends indicate that most users who’ve registered at one sharing site actually have profiles at 3 or more social networking sites, all at the same time, all being updated, pimped and checked at least twice a week. These same users apparently have at least 3 email addresses too. I can believe that … because I do.

I’ve got around 14 active email addresses, all for different purposes. It’s like dressing appropriately for different occasions. You wouldn’t wear shorts to a wedding. So I wouldn’t give my company email address to an old friend from school. And I wouldn’t give my personal address to a potential partner. And I wouldn’t expose my company name if I was making enquiries into a project that I wanted to keep confidential until an NDA was signed. ANYWAY, point here is that it seems old-school ‘one brand to rule them all’ mentality really doesn’t apply online anymore. People co-exist and co-share everywhere. Many hats, many usernames, many email addresses, many friends, many bookmarks.

Ever make water balloons when you were a kid? I did. I remember how each balloon I filled up was slightly more filled and more swollen than the one before. I wanted to see just how far I could fill it before it burst. Today, my head feels like that.

The more we try keep things lean and simple, the more there seems to be to think of. Build a feature here and it has ramifications there. Build a requirement there and you have to include extra fields somewhere else. Thank goodness for trees - without them we wouldn’t have paper and without paper, my head would probably have become water balloon history with the endless diagrams, reminders and layouts all over the place!

Been reading some very interesting white papers on social networking and penetration across US and Europe. Feedback later.

I’m starting to see red. And yellow. And blue

Zoopy’s not just coming to life … life is coming to Zoopy! Our brand has now given birth to a whole little family of Zoopyleans - with Zoopy Guy and Zoopy Girl taking centre stage. They’re really cute. Not that it’s our intention to be ‘cutesy’. But we couldn’t create faces in our logo and leave it at that. Like the Nedbank ad used to go, “who are these people?”, we thought.

And if we were wondering, we thought some of of you might start wondering. So we started chatting and our artist started scribbling and suddenly … the Zoopyleans have landed! Here’s a sneak peak of one of the little guys