Unfortunately I am in a kind of dilemma! I have been working on a completely new version for about three month now and some of you already had the chance to take a look at it. But it is far from beeing finished, because right now only the “Zoo” is overhauled and I am still working on the rest. It’s gonna be completely new, it’s gonna be different and it’s gonna be much, much better in any way! The dilemma is that I don’t want to show or tell more about it on the one hand, and on the other I wanted to use this blog again to report about the project. It helped me a lot during my bachelor thesis to write down my thoughts and tell about the development.

I will think about that and maybe you can give me some feedback in the meantime, what you would like to change on Zootool!!

Cheers

I hope you stay tuned for more!

The problem is fixed now! I am very sorry for the break and I hope you will go on using our Twitter-Features!!

The following video explains perfectly what stands behind it and how it works.

Distributed Social Networking - An Introduction from pixelsebi on Vimeo.

I think that it is important for developers to become a part of this and to support the standards and techniques in their projects to tie the different plattforms and networks together.

To make a start on Zootool, I’ve implemented microformats all over the place to make all of your contacts accessible by other sites (you should try identoo to see it work). Support for foaf, media rss feeds and finally the API are the next steps to make Zootool as open and user friendly as possible.

Zootool supports tons of video sites to make your Zoo the perfect place for your favourite videos. Today I am glad to finally introduce Myspace video support!! Sometimes things on the web are jinxed - there’s a super easy way to find out about the thumbnail url of Myspace videos but I needed more than four months to find it. Of course I didn’t really spend all my time with this shit, but I had about three or four afternoons during this time digging through google and the myspace developer site without success. Looking back I must have been blind but that’s the way it is sometimes.

Just a short hint: http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/rss.ashx?type=video&videoID=xxxxx

Another thing is embedded videos. The lasso has always been able to find embedded videos on websites, but it was pretty lame in recognizing them. The only way to save them in your Zoo was to directly open the embedded videos in Youtube, Vimeo or whatever and click the lasso once again. That’s over now for most of the supported video sites. If you discover a video from Youtube, Vimeo, Myspace, Blip.tv, Viddler and most of the rest on a blog or webpage you will be able to select it with the lasso and save it with all the thumbnail and embed stuff now. The rest will follow as soon as possible.

Randomly on every page reload new sticky little pieces of information will show up in the sidebar of the homepage and introduce you to interesting new, old or super old features. You might already know some of them, but you surely will be surprised by a few things you didn’t know yet. For all pro users there’s the “hide this” button. Just hit it and you won’t get bothered by this box ever again. Once it is hidden you can reactivate it in your settings.

A few weeks ago, when I saw the “import friends” feature on pownce, I thought that it would be awesome to have something similar for avatars. Gravatar is a great approach to global avatars you can take everywhere with you, but the system is pretty much limited to blogs and I haven’t seen very much social platforms using this. The great thing is that almost every major community is hosting a simple API to provide information about their users’ profiles. So I had a closer look at the API documentation of Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, Youtube and Vimeo and in all cases it was super simple to get the url of the avatar by username. Facebook and MySpace offer much more complicated APIs, so I skipped them temporarily. All you’ve got to do now, when you already own an account on one of these platforms, is to insert your username, hit the import button and see the magic happen! To import your picture simply click on your current avatar or go to the board > your picture