It’s been a brilliant year. Nothing compared to 2008 (which is going to be huge :)) but it’s been a really fulfilling time so it’s worth reflecting on what’s gone down in the last 12 months.

• We moved swiftly into Live Beta on 5 March 2007. This was our giant leap for mankind moment. We had been in closed beta since late 2006 but we hadn’t had full public exposure and feedback until now. We survived a couple of critical reviews, made some improvements, got a bit of international Web 2.0 attention and dusted ourselves off. At least, and at last, we were live and kicking.
• IOL embedded one of our videos. This really blew us away. In our very first month, South African news giant IOL embedded one of our news videos in one of their articles. Most impressive of all, it took Juanita Williams (IOL’s News Editor) exactly 10 minutes from us talking on the phone to the video being published in the article. This was really the start of a very symbiotic relationship. Since then, IOL has embedded our videos in 232 of their articles. The most recent one was published in an article on Christmas day.
• Things started to ramp up. iWeek magazine covered our launch and Helen Zille joined Zoopy and established Politics 2.0 in South Africa. On the revenue/advertising/sponsorship/integration side of things, we released our first co-branded collaborative project with BMW. Happily, it went down well with everyone.
• Warp speed, Mr Sulu. The year flew by with loads of hard work, events and planning for Zoopy v2. Bizcommunity joined Zoopy, we attended The Loeries in Margate, the World Association of Newspapers Congress and we were even voted number 2 in iWeek’s Top 10 Favourite Web Destinations. Not to mention our inclusion in Intelligence magazine’s Top Web 2.0 Startups to Look Out For. We also worked with Vince and Matt at M&G on the Secret McBride Tapes and notched up a record number of views. We also launched Zoopy Street Cam to capture public opinion on popular issues. And somewhere along the way, Zoopy was voted a Killer Startup.
• On the road again. We started getting out of the office a lot more. 27 Dinners, Podcamp, meetings with sponsors and partners and more trips to Joburg than the average Capetonian takes in a lifetime. All with good reason, as we prepared for our December unveiling.
• Zoopy v2 goes live. With Nokia goodness. Yeah, December was big for us. We flew up to Joburg (again - see above) to reveal what we had been planning and building since July this year. Together with a crack team from Nokia, we hosted a media conference to announce that Zoopy’s been selected as Nokia’s regional imaging partner for South and West Africa. In practical terms, this means that any Nokia Nseries owner can now install a quick config file by visiting http://www.zoopy.com/nseries and voila, any image or video in your phone’s gallery can be easily uploaded to your Zoopy profile, directly from your phone. You can even browse your media on your phone. And in in the months to come, it’s just going to get better. Future models of Nokia Nseries phones in the region will be sold with Zoopy embedded on the phone, straight out of the box.

  Second on our December Surprise list was the launch of Zoopy v2. Finally, we put into place what we had envisaged for Zoopy all along. A social media hub that allowed users to combine their media (videos, photos and podcasts) and easily link to that media directly from their Zoopy blogs - all in one place. Our blogs allow users to contextualise their media. Instead of just posting a video of their honeymoon, they can now embed that video into a blog and write as much as they like to describe the story behind the scenes. We also overhauled the entire front-end and started from scratch on the back-end code as well. This, let me assure you, was a long road. We planned everything item by item, page by page, feature by feature - some of the pages went through 3 or 4 design stages before we ticked it off the list. And though we still have a few bugs and unfinished bits lurking around, we’re thrilled to have moved Zoopy into a new space. Stability, security, scalability, enjoyability … all there, the way it should be.

  And perfectly timed, as we head into 2008.

Thanks to everyone who’s viewed, shared, blogged or uploaded to Zoopy in 2007 - you helped us make the last 12 months an incredibly enjoyable start to the journey ahead. Now hold on tight for 08. Happy new year!

Browsing through today’s daily Zoopy stats, a large amount of traffic has been coming from here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article3087079.ece

It’s an article published on Times Online, the online version of the UK newspaper giant The Sunday Times. At the end of the article (headlined as “Zuma triumph scares South Africa elite”) two links point to two Zoopy videos:

- The first is a video posted by one of our users, featuring the announcement that Jacob Zuma had received more votes than Mbeki

- The second is an episode of Zoopy Street Cam, featuring public reactions to Zuma’s ANC presidency

It’s pretty remarkable and extremely encouraging that media created by ordinary South Africans has enough value and relevance to be included in a ‘real world’ article published by a news behemoth like The Sunday Times UK.

Zoopy Street Cam launched on 14 September this year, as our way of opening up social media publishing to even more people, by taking video cameras to them and allowing them to make their voices heard on all kinds of everyday issues.

To quote from our original launch post:

For a long time, we’ve wanted to create a space on Zoopy that would represent the daily ups and downs of living in South Africa. A channel that would reflect the issues we’re all tackling and talking about on a day-to-day basis, which would eventually become a living archive of the weeks, months and years that constantly pass us by.

Sport, politics, entertainment, drama, you name it. If South Africa’s talking about it, Street Cam will cover it. But because Zoopy’s about social media, not one-way media, the Street Cam channel is also open to YOU to upload your thoughts on the daily issues.

Since launching, we’ve hosted hundreds of opinions on a variety of topics. See the vids here.

From today, we’re adding to our multimedia mix as part of our new site’s expansion into four different types of media: videos, photos, podcasts and blogs. The new addition is called Zoopy Street Cast and will be a podcast edition of Street Cam, but won’t be an audio copy of everything on the Cam version. It’ll feature different opinions from people who otherwise wouldn’t want to share their opinion in front of a video camera. It’ll allow more freedom, in terms of language and thought.

Here’s today’s first Street Cast episode - on Jacob Zuma’s successful election into the position of ANC president:

http://www.zoopy.com/podcast/detail/id/6906/

We pushed this to the top of the To Do list and everything’s now been migrated 100%.

Enjoy

I read something over at powertrip.co.za today that needs correcting:

Zoopy, a South African social networking site which clones functionality from sites like Flickr, Youtube, LiveJournal and Odeo, and forms a proudly South African mashup, have broken all offsite videos used by members of their site. Jason, Jerry and Pat please fix this as it looks silly having videos on Zoopy that don’t play offsite anymore. Url gets redirected to is http://www.zoopy.com/member/list.

Posted by Jacques

I commented on Jacques’s post directly but have included our response below, just in case:

Thanks for spotting (and sharing) this temporary situation Jacques, but your post needs correction.

Your comment that “Zoopy … have broken all offsite videos used by members of their site” is not true.

A group of videos and photos are still being migrated over to our new server and, yes, these are temporarily not available through players embedded on sites outside of Zoopy.com.

However, this is NOT true for ‘ALL offsite videos’.

Some examples of offsite videos that work perfectly well:

1. http://justinhartman.com/2007/11/29/presentation-courtesy-of-nic-and-zoopy/

2. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3045&art_id=nw20071020103501774C884282

3. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3045&art_id=nw20071015172641909C659501

4. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=139&art_id=vn20070721084722673C304141

Any users with sites that have been temporarily affected by videos not loading will be pleased to see these videos displaying again during the course of this week.

The news is out. And we couldn’t be more thrilled about what this means for our users.

At a media launch of the new Nokia N82 held in Johannesburg yesterday, Nokia announced that users of their Nseries devices are now able to directly upload, organise, share and browse their videos and photos on Zoopy.com. All that’s required is an Nseries device and a Zoopy login.

Visitors got to see the magic in action on the new Nokia N82, with 5 megapixel pictures moving straight from the N82 to their Zoopy profiles in less than a minute, including full titles and descriptions of the uploads.

If you have an Nseries phone, it’s incredibly easy to set up (http://www.zoopy.com/nokia) and once you’re done, uploading can be done in a single click on the phone. Now you can share your social media on Zoopy from wherever you are, whenever you like.

At last, our new site is live!

It’s been a long time coming.

After running v1 for four months, we started work on v2 in July this year. We had a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve, and with users giving us constant feedback, we knew that the next version was going to involve major upgrades across the board. What we quickly realised though was that we needed more than just an upgrade. We needed a complete overhaul of design - something fresher, more fun and easier to navigate. We also needed to completely rebuild our back-end. We needed a framework, solid code structure, a scalable+stable+secure infrastructure, smart database schemas and improved technical solutions at every possible point.

It’s important to say that these changes started with users and are ending with users. We’ve decided to make our new site live during the finishing and polishing stages. Partly because we just couldn’t wait to get it out but mostly because this is a great time to start getting early feedback from users. We’ll be finishing everything over the holidays and making some exciting announcements and competition launches during that time as well. So call it kismet, we just had to go live right now.

Because we’ve gone live early, there are some known issues right now in certain areas in blogs and groups. These, together with multiple uploads, will be resolved in the next couple of weeks.

Here’s a quick look at some of what we’ve packed into Zoopy v2:

Videos, photos, podcasts and blogs. All in one place.
We’ve extended our social media platform to include podcasts and blogs. This was always part of the plan but we wanted to grow Zoopy as a brand and a user generated sharing destination first. Our thinking on this one was strongly supported by regular user requests to look at extending our media options. From that, it makes sense that if our users are uploading videos, photos and podcasts to a single location, there are definite benefits to being able to associate that media to a blogging interface that sits in the same neighbourhood. No worries about compatibility or code being shared between four different platforms.

Advanced video compression and content delivery
We’ve rebuilt the way we process videos. This delivers smaller converted file sizes with lower bandwidth usage by viewers. This together with our revised hosting solution that includes a reliable and quick combination of local hosting and an international content distribution network, will result in faster video viewing while maintaining great online video quality.

More space for your photos to shine
Detailed EXIF information is now available on all photos (including shutter speed, camera model, aperture settings and so on) and you have the ability to view photos in five different sizes. You’ll also notice that our thumbnails are bigger, brighter and crisper.

Creative Commons licensing available on your media
The default copyright setting on your items is All Rights Reserved but you now have the ability to allocate a Creative Commons license to any media item you’ve uploaded, allowing you to decide how you’d like to share the content you’re hosting on Zoopy.

A better profile page
We’ve streamlined the whole interface. It’s modular, quicker and displays more of your media and activity at a glance. It also allows you to run your personal Google Adsense code inside the page, making making visits to your profile even more meaningful.

Besides all this, we’ve also improved:

Groups
A new interface that incorporates description, calendar, noticeboard, media display and a threaded group message forum.

Channels
We’ve reworked some of the channel categories and now have 28 distinct areas of interest to post your media to.

Albums, editing and operating systems
Albums look and work better. Deleting and editing media is so much easier than v1. And uploading is more intuitive. Most importantly, the new site is cross-browser, cross-operating system friendly.

So what do you think? We want to know. If you find anything you think isn’t working the way it should, or needs improving, fill in a bug report and you could walk away with a little late Xmas surprise just for helping us making Zoopy a more enjoyable platform for all.

Some more exciting news coming later today - so watch this space

It’s the Friday before and we’re feeling a little like the Springboks in the changing rooms before the final. We’ve worked hard, done our best and can’t wait to deliver. All we have to do now is run out onto the field and do it!

More details to come once we’re out there. We can’t wait to hear, see and read what you think about it all