fragmentate's Journal: Social Contribution: ZooLoo, a new way to socialize

Just over one year ago the adventure began. We set out to create a new way to connect with others on the internet. There were a lot of blogs, and social networks to choose from. Then there were the less often used hosting companies where you could set up a very personalized presence on the web.

The problem with blogs is that there are too many in too many different places written by too many people using too many pseudonyms. No one really knows who YOU are. Frankly, it's not very personal either. It's a lot of effort to personalize it. It's very hard to share. All a blog really offers most people is a place to express their opinion.

Social sites often include some type of blogging mechanism. However, there is a price to pay. The game of social networks is making friends with as many people as you can using the mechanism they provide. Somewhere in that system the individuals are lost. It's all about building that friend list. Very little personalization occurs.

The saving grace is hosting, right? You can customize your site. You can invite whoever you want to see it. You control the content. You can install blogging software. Wait, you don't know how to install web applications on a remote server? You don't know HTML? PHP? ASP? JSP? You're going to have a difficult time with the hosted solution.

Well, I introduce you to ZooLoo. It has the best of all worlds. There are social features so if you delight in finding and adding arbitrary people to your friend list you can. If you want to blog, we even included a blog. You can manage photos there. The real benefit is that you can create customized pages as if you had your own hosting. You have a site you can show to others. You have something you can customize. The tool we've written is called "zCreator", and it allows you to create site pages.

That's not enough? Well, you can also buy your own domain name from us and have it pointed at your new ZooLoo site. Or, if you already own a domain name and know how to set the DNS, you can use that domain name instead. It is vanity domain names the right way.

Best of all you can control who sees it. You can have a "My Heavy Metal Vomit Parties" page but restrict who can see it. Maybe your parents shouldn't see that page. Then you can have a photo album with "Pictures That Make Mom Happy" -- that you may want your friends to see.

That's the beauty of ZooLoo. I think we got it right. Now we need to polish it based on user feedback.

I am the CTO of ZooLoo. And I'm proud of what we have accomplished: My ZooLoo Site