In case you hadn't noticed, on Friday night we made some significant changes to the navigation and layout on the home page -- hopefully for the better.  First of all, this is a work in progress, and we consider this just the first of many steps and tweaks towards a better UI, so if things aren't working for you, please shout, we will work out the kinks.

The motivation behind all this is largely in reponse to newbie complaints of "too many links" and "navigation is too confusing".  And after some thought, we realized that yes, they are right, for a newbie there is quite a lot of stuff to digest on the home page.  We don't want Zoji to seem overwhelming.  So we hid some stuff, moved other stuff, and deleted some stuff.  Having trouble finding a link?  See if you can find it with the new layout, and if now, leave a comment here.

Thanks,
-Dan

Some of you may be aware of the huge problem that spam has posed for Zoji in
recent times.  It's always a shame when the actions of a few rogue individuals
spoil the fun for the rest of us, but that's just reality I suppose. Maybe
you've already been affected, maybe you haven't, but due to the seriousness of
the spam problem, we've been forced to take action.  We hate to cut features,
especially those we've worked hard to do, but this is in the interest of protecting all you
Zoji users.  We are not in the business of cluttering your personal inbox with
spam.

That being said, we've unfortunately had to make some changes to Zoji's
messaging capabilities this week.  You will no longer be able to have persons
outside Zoji reach your Zoji e-mail address, and thus, they will not be
able to spam you.  Zoji-to-Zoji messaging functionality will
remain completely intact of course, there are no changes to that.  People you
message will still receive system-generated e-mails notifying them of new
messages in their Zoji inbox.  

If you have any questions, please do leave a comment here, or e-mail us
at support @zoji.com.

Thanks!
Dan

Tonight we rolled out a feature known in these here parts as Chatterbox.  What an odd name, you might be saying to yourself, and it is.  However, the name actually makes perfect sense when you learn that a Chatterbox is, to put it simply, a box where you can chat.

Chatterbox is a merging of two of our major features--it's basically a ZIM (Zoji Instant Messenger) window embedded into an event invitation.  Any guests who are currently viewing the z-vite are able to participate in a group chat with everyone else who is viewing the z-vite.  We hope this will add a new level of interactivity to z-vites, and make the page a place where invitees will hang out and shoot the breeze, rather than stop by, read the event details, and surf away.

It's just one of a number of things we've been doing to better integrate z-vites with the other rich functionality of the site.  We've got all these other pretty neat features, might as well use 'em, eh?

How does one go about adding a Chatterbox to their event?  It's quite simple, you just go to the host toolbox (a minor UI reorganization we also rolled out today) of your event, and click "Add a Chatterbox to this page".

To see an example of a Chatterbox in action, check out our little fake sample event.

Being such a new feature, there are plenty of things we plan to do to fill it out, including the ability to add a Chatterbox to a group page, letting you pop out the Chatterbox into a separate IM window so you can surf with your main browser window, viewing the complete chat history, letting you start private chats with other event invitees and more!

Anyway, hope you like it.  And now, time for bed...

to some new Zoji features!  Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving weekend.

If you've created a Z-vite recently, you may have noticed the new Manage Invitees feature.  This is a page specifically for the event organizer to perform guest management tasks, such as responding on behalf of guests, removing guests, filling-in names for guests, and marking guests as having paid for an event.  You can also sort the list by name, RSVP response, and paid status -- handy for larger events when you need to generate a final guest roster.

There are now more granular controls for messaging event invitees.  Now when you click "Send message to invitees", you get to choose whether you want to send to guests responding Yes, No, Maybe, and Undecided, or any combination of them.

Previously, Zoji would automatically send e-mails when and event's time/location changed, and when you cancel an event.  There are now more messaging controls -- you can choose not not send e-mails in these situations if you don't want to.

These are features that you may or may not ever use or notice, but several Evite-to-Zoji converts have made mention of the fact that Evite still has a few minor features that Zoji lacks.  And you know our ego here at Zoji, there's just no way we can stand for that.  So we're pounding them out.

You may have noticed some new cool skins from Josiah ... he's busy cranking these out to fill out the Designer Skins library.  One-by-one we increase our selection of classy skins.

Restaurant and Bar popularity searches should be working correctly now.

Stay tuned for a really cool real-time Z-vite feature Kev's been at the grind with...

-ShennyD

It's been an eventful week here at Zoji HQ.

It actually starts last Friday, where, thanks to Dan's efforts, we got our first mention in a widely read, mainstream tech blog, Mashable.  That was pretty cool, we got a few hundred hits out of it.  I figured that'd be about it when I started to see visitors trickling in from other blogs and websites that I'd never seen before.  Checked them out, and was surprised to find more and more blogs and website indexes were writing about Zoji!  It was kind of surreal to see our logo plastered on all these sites we'd never contacted.

All in all, I've counted 12 other sites so far that have featured Zoji in a post or an index entry.  Fascinating how exposure begets exposure, a side effect I hadn't considered.  Interestingly enough, a large number of our hits came from a Belgian site, more than any other site aside from Mashable, I think.  I guess those Belgians are a wired bunch!

Fast forward to Monday, where we got written up by John Cook, who covers startups, entrepreneurs, and venture capital for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  That blog post gave us a bit more exposure in the Seattle area, and we were contacted by more people after the PI post than the Mashable one.  Though I would guess that Mashable's readership is larger than the PI's venture capital blog, I think people pay more attention to a startup when it's local.  It seems less faceless, less anonymous, I suppose.

That takes us to yesterday, where we had a mini-version of last winter's windstorm.  Dan lost power at Zoji HQ as did I at home in Kirkland.  Dan, in an ill-advised burst of hubris, said to me, "Good thing we moved the servers from the garage to a real datacenter with triple power redundancy.  For once we don't have to worry about outages."  Bad move, Dan.  Naturally, the words were barely out of his mouth when Dan discovered that Zoji had gone down.

I won't go into the complicated details of why the datacenter lost power, which I might add, happened to be the first outage in that area in seven years according to an electrician Dan spoke to.  Regardless, Dan spent the rest of the day working feverishly to get Zoji back up and running.  Just our luck for this to happen right after getting our first press coverage.  Anyway, that's about all of the interesting news I had for you.

Now for the less interesting stuff. :)

We just rolled out a slight change in behavior to your homepage.  In an effort to reduce homepage clutter and bring the "Your Events" box higher up on the page, we changed the behavior of the "Recent Messages" box.

Whereas before, it would simply display the last five messages in your inbox, now it only displays the last five unread messages.  If you've read all your messages, the box will display no messages.  To view your old read messages, simply view your inbox.  In that regard, the homepage functions less as a mini-inbox now, and more like a "new stuff" notification center.

"Whoa, now I have a ton of old unread messages on my homepage!" you might say.  Fear not, you can easily mark all of your unread mail as read, simply by going to your Inbox and clicking "Mark all messages as read."

Among other recent changes:

• Renamed the "My Zoji" menu to "My Stuff" and gave it a more prominent icon.  Maybe people will actually notice it now. :)
• Your event drafts now appear on your homepage so they're easier to find.
• Improvements to the picture picker:
• You can now click on your profile picture or an event picture in order to choose a new one.  We think this is more discoverable than the previous way of having to view the picture and click "Make this your profile picture".
• You can now upload pictures directly into the picture picker.  This is useful for the times that you're writing a blog post, and want to upload a pic to use in your post.  Now you just bring up the picture picker, upload the pic, choose the pic you just uploaded, and voila.
  

Have a good weekend!