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.