Congratulations to Garsen, the winner of a brand new 13″ aluminium MacBook for March 2009. We hope your friends have enjoyed discovering Zoopy and that you love every second of your new Apple masterpiece!

We’ve also made the decision that this will be our last MacBook giveaway for inviting friends to Zoopy. After some recent over-enthusiasm on the part of some of our users, we received signficant feedback about the downsides of the competition - and we’ve taken this seriously.

Our first step was to improve the invite system and reduce the chance of people receiving too many invites. Unfortunately, the MacBook is still a prize big enough for users to do just about anything to put themselves in line to win it.

So today’s MacBook will be the last prize we’re giving away in connection with Zoopy invites. You’ll still have all the same functionality to invite friends, but you’ll be doing it purely for the joy of Zoopy-fying your friends, colleagues and loved ones.

Any questions, please shout.

Reuben Goldberg, tech addict and passionate host of The Internet Economy on Classic fM, chatted to Zoopy CEO Jason Elk about how Zoopy began, what we’re up to and where we’re going.

This interview was broadcast on The Internet Economy on Classic fM on 27 March 2009.

Here’s our new inside-the-office sign! The neon glow just makes it.

As people around the globe prepare to switch off their lights during Earth Hour (8:30pm - 9:30pm) on Saturday 28 March 2009, social media community Zoopy has supported the initiative by spreading the message to their users in a novel way.

Between now and Saturday 28 March, every visitor to the site will see a dimmed version of the Zoopy page they’ve arrived at, with an Earth Hour logo and message prompting them to find out more.

Leading up to Saturday, the dimmed effect will only appear on the first Zoopy page a user visits. During Earth Hour itself, every visitor will again be prompted with the same message to reinforce the reminder to participate.

According to Zoopy CEO Jason Elk, “We can’t afford to ignore the impact that the human race has had, and continues to have, on the world around us. Earth Hour is a bold and compelling initiative that reinforces the environmental challenges ahead and gives us all a small, practical way of starting the journey towards healing our planet. We hope that by introducing the cause to members of our community, we’re helping to create a wider positive impact for us all”.

Earth Hour 2009 is a global initiative by the World Wide Fund for Nature which acts as a worldwide call to action to every individual, business and community to take a stand against Climate Change. More information is available at http://www.earthhour.org.za.

For your publishing convenience, we have developed functionality to auto-share links to your Zoopy uploads on Twitter and Facebook.  We hope this will make the task of getting your uploads out there just that little bit easier.

Twitter

In order to publish your uploads as tweets, we require your Twitter username and password. You can fill in your login details on your profile page under the Settings tab.

By filling in your Twitter login details, we’ll be able to submit a tweet which looks similar to the following:

Facebook

Zoopy makes use of the Facebook Connect API to enable a secure link between Zoopy and Facebook. By granting Zoopy access, you’ll be able to update your Facebook status automatically when you upload.

In order to make use of this functionality, you’ll have to go through a few short steps in your Settings tab.  You only have to do this once.

1. In the Facebook section, click on Connect
   
2. Fill in your Facebook login details in the popup window, if you aren’t already logged in.
3. Once you are logged in and Zoopy is connected to Facebook, click ‘Grant offline access’.
4. In the popup window, click on ‘Allow Status Updates’
5. All done!

Publishing

Once you’ve filled in your Twitter details, and connected using Facebook Connect, you’ll be able to choose whether or not to publish to these services with each upload.  The following two checkboxes are now available on the ‘Publish’ screen after uploading:

February was an incredibly lucky month for Zoopy member Chris Dawson (http://www.zoopy.com/chrisdawson), who is the most recent recipient of a brand new aluminium 13″ MacBook in our monthly Invite & Win giveaway.

You know it’s easy to enter, right? Just sign in to your Zoopy profile, click the ‘Invite’ tab and start inviting your friends for your chance to win in March’s draw. And if you don’t win then, there’s always April, and May, and June, and … you get the picture

It’s been an incredible 24 months of being live in the big wide world. So much has happened and it’s just the beginning! Thank you for helping make the Zoopy community the special and engaging place it is.

An enormous thank you to the incredible, tirelessly passionate Zoopy team, responsible for everything you see before you - and a lot of the things you don’t. Just look at the mischief they arranged to celebrate our big day:

The making of the awesome Zoopy cake:

The world’s gone Zoopy today:

The public guesses how old we are today - and predict where we’ll be in another year’s time:

And some other members of the public were awesome enough to wish us well with these videos too:

Kerry-Anne from Cape Town Daily Photo popped in for a surprise co-birthday (their site also turned 2 this week!):

LocalList.co.za, a site dedicated to the promotion of locally-hosted sites (like Zoopy!), wishes Zoopy a happy 2nd birthday:

The day ended with some of our Zoopy members from Ireland (in their underwear) singing happy birthday to us from the top of of Lion’s Head:

Hip hip hooray and here’s to many more!

Zoopy is proud to announce the immediate availability of a RESTful API.  The API is currently ‘read-only’, but we will continue to add functionality to it as we get feedback.

The API also requires you to have a Zoopy username and password, so if you haven’t yet signed up you can do so right away at http://www.zoopy.com/register.  You can read about that and more in the API documentation at http://www.zoopy.com/docs/api/rest.

Please direct any feedback, suggestions or features requests to api@zoopy.com.  We’d also love to hear how and where you’ve used the API, so drop us a mail when you do!

With many new additions to Zoopy since launching almost two years ago, our Terms of Use were in need of serious review and updating. What we ended up doing (thanks to new media lawyer Paul Jacobson’s very sound advice and sterling attention to detail) was rewrite them completely, incorporating rules, rights and limitations specific to Zoopy and our users.

We’re very pleased with the new set of Terms that are now live on the site from today (PDF). Please have a read through everything and make sure that you’re happy too. If there’s anything you’d like to send us feedback on, please contact us.

In this video, Paul explains the overall thinking and approach to our new Terms of Use:

You’ll see that part of the Terms of Use refers to users being sensitive when sending invites to friends, and sending to people who they believe will be receptive to the invites. This has been included as a recent addition, after considering some negative feedback to yesterday’s improved invite system.

Further to this, I’ve included a video message below to speak to you directly, to let you know where we’re coming from, what our intentions are, and some of the additional improvements we’ve already made to the system based on some of your feedback:

To those people who might have been negatively affected by any invites, I apologise. This was never our intention. Going forward, we’ve limited the way in which invites are sent in two ways:

1. A user is only able to invite one contact from any service once ever. For example, if you sent me a twitter invite, you wouldn’t be able to send me another Twitter invite again.

2. Once an invite has been sent to a contact on any one service, we will stop an invite being sent to that user on that service again. For example, if you sent me a Gmail invite, no one else would be able to send me another invite via Gmail.

Further, if an invite recipient clicks on the opt-out link at the bottom of an email invite, they will automatically be opted-out of any further email invites via Zoopy. However, we have no way of connecting that email address to Twitter or Facebook accounts because all we have access to for those services are username and user id.

As I said in the video, please continue to send us feedback as often as necessary. We do always want to hear from you, positive or negative. You can contact the Zoopy team here or mail me directly at jason@zoopy.com.

Thanks again for the feedback and support. See you on Zoopy!

This weekend Zoopy deployed a new invite system that allows you to import contacts not only from email providers such as Gmail and Hotmail, but also from your favourite social networks.  You can now import contacts from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, as well as several others.  More invites mean more entries into our monthly draw to win a brand new 13″ MacBook.

We’ve also implemented some AJAX magic to make the make the whole experience of sharing the Zoopy love a lot smoother, and we’ve added a counter to show you how many entries you have into the next competition draw.  To test out the new interface, log in and click on the ‘Invite’ tab in your profile now!