What’s new this release:

• Re-design of the Home page! New users will also see a much improved version of this page.
• My Friends and My Trips have also got a minor facelift to keep up with the new Home.
• Access passes to private trips. Now users can request permission to see a trip otherwise private. More below.
• Privatized trip names. By popular demand you can now hide even the trip name for really secret trips.
• Trips are now smarter and can infer the start/end of the trip automagically from the dates you enter in the itinerary.
• Requests that pertain to a trip are now distributed to all editors, not just the owner as before, so that everybody can pitch in.
• The first version of the itinerary flyby (a.k.a trip animation) is out!
• And last but not least more feedbacks have been addressed.

Access passes

Here is the obligatory eye-candy detailing how you can request a pass to a trip:

We are very excited about this release, we hope you’ll enjoy it too. We have big plans for the immediate future, so stay tuned!

As some of you may have noticed a new link has been added on Trip cover pages for trips with Itineraries.

The new link (”Itinerary flyby”) takes you to the new Trip animation page.  The first time you go to any trip animation, you will be prompted to install the Google Earth plugin.  If you do (and we strongly encourage you to!!) you will get to see an animation of your trips in 3D!!  If you elect not to install the plugin, you will still be able to see an animation of the trips but only in 2D.

We have not made any official announcements about the animation feature yet as we are wrapping up a couple of Todo items for it, but it is unofficially available so enjoy!!  We’d love to hear some feedback!

If you are into cycling, you can check out some of the Cycling Tour itineraries I already setup (Tour de France 2009 , Tour Down Under 2009, Giro d’Italia 2009 ), some good training rides at some of the training camps I have gone to in the past (Georgia , Arizona ), as well as some other epic rides I have done (summitting Haleakala in my Maui, Hawaii 2007 trip ) and some notable races I participated in (Poland, 2008 )

I’ll be adding more of the big Tours in the near feature so stay tuned!!

B.

What’s new in this release:

• Faster loading of images, especially in the picture dialog. You should see most improvements when zooming in.
• Twice as fast upload in “Full resolution” mode.
• Several more feedbacks were addressed
• Nicer looking flyby, but we haven’t quite announced this feature, so I’ll stop here…

We are hard at work on two important new features, we hope to have news for you in about a week’s time.

What’s new in this release:

• New uploader with much faster image preview. Several folks complained that the preview is very slow on large directories containing high resolution images (say 5 mega-pixel or more).
• Nicer looking Profile pages. Better looking pages never killed anyone…

We are quite excited about the new uploader and we hope the upload process will be now a bit smoother for everybody.

Hi folks,

This is a big release for us, as it brings quite a few changes requested in the last little while. The big items are an upload process that’s a lot more user friendly, and the completion of privacy-related work started some time ago.

What’s new in this release:

• Picture-level privacy controls: you can now control the privacy setting on each individual picture. More on this below.
• Totally redesigned upload process: you can now upload directly from the My Trips page without having to first go into a trip.
• A new upload quality setting: folks that prefer larger, better looking pictures can now use the ‘optimal upload’ setting during the upload. This setting strikes a better balance between speed and quality if you have a fast internet connection.
• Faster than a greased weasel: we’ve made changes throughout the site to make it even faster to load. In particular the picture details dialog should feel lighter now.
• The picture tagging, picture upload, and trip join request dialogs have been reworked. They are officially sweet!
• You can now attach a message when uploading pictures into a trip where you are not a participant. It makes it easier for the recipient to understand what’s going on with the pictures you’ve sent.
• If you change the trip description several times in a row (e.g. fixing spelling mistakes), it will no longer clutter people’s news feeds with several messages.
• As always, quite a few of the feedbacks from our users have been addressed, and several rendering problems in IE6 have been fixed.

Picture level privacy

We now have picture-level privacy controls. This brings the privacy on Zipalong to a very good level of granularity that should please most users.

Here is a screenshot of the actual UI:

By default your pictures will have Default visibility, which means that it inherits the trip privacy setting. You can now change this to one of: Participants only, Friends only, Members only, and Public, independent of your trip setting. Marking the picture Public opens it up to be indexed by Google.

Upload quality

It turns out that some people like really fast uploads, others prefer larger, higher quality pictures. Since you can’t have both, you can now choose the one that’s right for you.

That is, you now have a choice between the already existing Fast upload, and the brand new Optimal upload:

The Fast upload gives you Facebook-like upload speed (at a bit better quality!), while the Optimal upload is similar to Flickr in terms of speed/quality balance.

You can of course still upload using Full upload to get your photos online at their original size/quality, but it is not really practical at today’s upload speeds if you have hundreds of photos to upload (e.g if you have a 7 mega-pixel camera it can take a few hours to upload 200 hundred pictures).

We recommend the Optimal upload, as it provides very good quality (in fact, as good as Full upload for online viewing) and fast upload speed.

What’s new in this release:

• Trip-level privacy controls: as promised last time, we managed to get this into this release! More on this below.
• Improved My Friends page with listing of people you may know and ability to import contacts anytime.
• Redesigned My Trips page, including a nice new page for the case when there are no trips to display.
• Redesigned all of the request bubbles using larger picture, fonts, and buttons. Much nicer to look at.
• In picture details we moved the search area to the left-hand side of the screen. This means larger area to display the pictures in, less redrawing when you move between pictures.
• Smarter listing of pictures, such as when picking your profile picture or the trip cover. We make better use of the available real-estate, and use a more intuitive listing on screen.
• Fast feedback whenever you invite someone to become your friend.
• Darker bubbles for better contrast, easier on the eyes.
• Lots of internal work to make things cleaner, meaner, and faster.
• And last but not least, we addressed another bunch of feedbacks from our users.

Trip level privacy

As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, we now have trip-level privacy controls. This brings the privacy on Zipalong to a pretty good level of granularity.

Here is the obligatory screenshot of trip the privacy controls:

By default your trip will have Default visibility, which means that it inherits your profile setting with the added twist that participants always have access to the trip.

You can now change this setting to one of: Participants only, Friends only, Members only, and Public, independent of your profile setting. Marking the trip Public opens it up to be indexed by Google.

It is worth noting here that trip participants always get access to the trip even if you mark it Friends only and they are not friends with you.

Eye candy

So before I go, here are a couple of screenshots of the redesigned pages (My Trips and My Friends):

What’s new in this release:

• Suggest friends to other Zipalong users (more below).
• Improved the Find Friends page to clearly separate the users that we find based on the contacts you import from the ones we guess based on other sources.
• We added a link called How do I look? closed to your picture profile which takes you to your own profile page, as seen by other users. We discovered that a lot of users wanted to get to it, and they had to go through hoops to do it. Now it’s just a click away.
• User names are now abbreviated a lot nicer when they don’t fit in the alloted space (e.g. Dimi Paun will become Dimi P. or Dimi depending on the available space).
• More work on improving the load speed, we like snappy sites as much as anybody. We already do quite a bit in terms optimizing the browsing experience, but we always try to do better.
• Lots of feedbacks from our users where addressed.

Suggest Friends

The new feature this release is the ability to suggest friends to other users. To do so, you just select a few users from your own list of friends and send them to the other user:

How do you get to do so? There are two ways:

• When you approve a new friend, you will be prompted automatically to suggest new friends if it makes sense. This is a great way to help others to get started and connect with other people on Zipalong.
• You can just go to someone’s profile page, where you will find a Suggest friends link (on both the main profile page and the profile friends page).

And since we went all out with screenshots, here is a quick shot of the new link to your profile page:

Plans

So what’s next? We hope to have trip-level privacy settings and a revamped My Friends page in the next release, scheduled for the week of Nov 10, 2008.

Just 10 short days from the previous release…

What’s new in this release:

• Privacy control, as promised last time. We are rather excited about this feature, as it has been requested by many of our users. More on this below.
• Importing of your contacts from other online services such as Google, or MSN, all nicely integrated in the welcome pages. We will make this feature available to existing users shortly.
• Enhanced invite dialog, with full history of your emails (including the ones imported with your contacts) and status of already invited people (screenshot below).
• Improved “My Friends” page for people that have not yet connected as friends with anyone on Zipalong. It makes it straightforward for the user to get started with their friends.
• Confirmation emails are now being sent via email when your friendship invite or trip join request is approved. So that you know.
• No longer change the map zoom level when centering the map on a picture, place, landmark, or note. It was an interesting idea to remember the zoom level the marker was placed at, but it ended up confusing people that didn’t know about it.
• And as always, a few bugs reported by some of our users got what they deserved.

This is the new invite dialog, with a contact highlighted in yellow to denote that he/she has already been invited.

Also, we now keep track of your contacts’ name, shown here in white.

Privacy

This is the first batch of privacy-related changes. It allows (as shown in the screenshot above) to change your account settings between Friends only, Member only, and Public.

By default your account has Members only visibility, which means that only Zipalong members can view your friends and your trips. If that is too loose for your taste, change it to Friends only. If you would like Google to index your account, change the privacy setting to Public.

Your trips automatically inherit your account privacy setting, with the additional feature of always being available to the other trip participants as well (regardless if they are your friends or not).

We are working on more granular privacy controls at the trip and picture level, and hope to land these feature in the next release (fingers crossed!).

Hot on the heels of 1.4.0, version 1.5.6 sees the light of day today. This version is aimed at tying some loose ends left over from the previous release, and addressing quite a few feedbacks we got from you.

What’s new in this release:

• Your Friends and Trips pages have been changed to match the new icon standards that’s now used throughout the site. More to come later, as we have some really cool plans for these pages.
• For the users that don’t have a profile picture, we now have new, gender-based place holders.
• We have integrated this blog with the site news that are being inserted in a user’s news feed. Now you’ll see links from the site news to the relevant blog entry.
• We have addressed a long-standing request to have a more intuitive display of dates in the itinerary summary for closed-loop itineraries. A closed loop itinerary is one where you go A->B->C>A. We now handle such cases much better.
• Better handling of errors, we hope you’ll never get to enjoy these
• Lots of smaller improvements throughout the site.

Next is much improved privacy support and easier way to connect to your friends. If you would like other features in the next release, just use the “feedback” link at the top of the page.

Alright folks. It’s been 6 weeks in the making but after some hard work and many sleepless nights, plus several re-writes of the code, we’re getting close to releasing a preview of a revolutionary way to plan, view and share trips!!

We won’t let the cat out of the box just yet. There is still a week or two of fine tuning to be done before we are ready to release the feature for prime time consumption but we thought we should get you ready for it!