Archive for September, 2008
Experts and the Economy
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
This has been what could best be described as an interesting few days of us all here in the United States, and particularly those of us in the tech sector and early adopter crowd. Between the official presidential debates (and the online commentary), the online debates, the and the debate on the hill over what we should do with 700 billion, there are a lot of “expert opinions,” and not a lot hard answers. I’ve spoken to a few experts, and done a good deal of thinking, and while I don’t have all the answers, I think I’m closer to understanding everything than I was.
Yesterday, Robert Scoble asked the tech blogosphere’s ’thought leaders’ to weigh in on this issue of the economy (and included Mashable amongst those he invoked), and today all but declared defeat in his search for expert opinion. The problem, I think, is that he’s searching for information in all the wrong places. I too went through the substance withdrawal he’s going through now a while back, and documented it here at Mashable.
Lookin’ for Expert Love in All The Wrong Places…
The grand take-a-way here is that the philosophical model for Wisdom of the Crowds breaks down very easily when it’s subjected to, as James Surowiecki put it, a crowd that is too homogeneous, too centralized, too divided, too imitative, or too emotional. In the case of FriendFeed and Twitter (where Scoble is primarily searching), the crowd fits three of those failure criteria: homogeneous, imitative and emotional.
The tech blogosphere is just that: a homogeneous group of thinkers, coders, executives and writers who on microformat social media platforms imitate each other in a state of emotional pandemoneum. This isn’t a slam - it’s hard not to be emotional when faced with the prospect of economic obliteration (and I for one enjoy the many daily imitative memes started by various members of the community).
Steven Hodson said earlier today that “the idea that a Nobel Laureate of Economics or a discoverer of the Human Genome are going to be found sitting around there computers chumming it up on FriendFeed ot Twitter is ridiculous.” While it’s a true statement, it misses the point a little on the crowd wisdom theory. The limited space requires the reduction of complex ideas to a succinct shortform, that in turns encourages rapid back and forth discussion. Compile the factor of hundreds and thousands of users in close quarters communicating on the same topic, and you’ve got an environment at which truth can be distilled quite rapidly under optimal circumstances.
The problem is that we’re all very clearly divorced from normal circumstances, and the vast majority are all trying to get a handle on topics and lingo that we’d have a hard time understanding in the best of circumstances. I’ve probably been researching the whole economic fiasco more than most, and while I pride myself on understanding macroeconomics better than the average bear, my head is swimming as badly as those who just get the cable news drive-by explanation.
So How do We Make Sense of This?
This is a situation where the standard Internet research techniques don’t really apply. Wikipedia doesn’t really cover breaking news that well, and most of the experts in this game have a chip in this game. Thus, it’s hard to find an idea or interpretation of the situation that’s balanced and reasonable, let alone completely umbiased.
To try an circumvent the punditry and get to a set of opinions I could easily decipher, I started reading the opinions from the various think tanks. The Heritage Institute, the CATO Institute and the Club for Growth. They all had varying ideas about the passage of the bailout bill (and whether it was the best thing for the country), which is no different than asking the various financial publications, politicians and Wall St. pundits.
The difference here is that they are organizations that I’m familiar with, I know each of their guiding principals, and thus know the underlying reasons they make the recommendations they make. I can’t say the same about every politician or Wall Street pundit. They all have biases tied to their jobs, their staffers and all sorts of unknowns that to track down turns into a rabbit hunt. This makes an already complicated task of finding out what’s going on nigh-impossible.
Here’s What I Found Out
That’s why today I decided to go ahead and consult some folks who’s job it is to folow these sorts of things. Back in March, I served on a panel on online privacy with a resident scholar for the CATO Institute by the name of Jim Harper. I gave him a ring and invited him on the program to help put this all in laymens terms.
We’ll be posting the video of that tomorrow morning, but the parameters of the conversation are what’s most germane to this particular piece. We tried to stay away from worst case scenarios as show openers, and talk about what’s actually going on right now in his and his fellow scholars’ experience. We tried to connect the dots in terms of what the various potential scenarios mean for our industry and the general economic health of the nation.
One thing in particular that he said which puts these thoughts in perspective is that a lot of the media is centered in New York City, so the spin we see is heavily colored by the investment bank failure - which is very real, and not by Main Street banks, which as of now seem to be dealing with the crisis in stride. Because the New York City news desks only see what is around them, the calm and unemotional perspective is considerably lacking from most of the coverage.
In our discussion, though, we tried to stay away from blame-casting. It’s not important which party or individuals created this mess. the circumstances that created it are important, because they need to be addressed to prevent a repeat performance. More important, though, is how we weather the storm and what immediate steps are needed to prevent a disaster of catastrophic proportions.
If you want the audio track to our discussion, feel free to subscribe to our audio podcast feed, or come back tomorrow morning and watch the video. In the mean time, I encourage you to not take the pundits words at face value.
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Once More Musicians and Fans Will Get The Shaft
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
The music business has to be one of the most contentious online of all industries with so many players involved. On one side you have the record labels who are facing an ever increasing devaluation of their physical media business. You have the trade organizations for the music industry trying to maintain their power base and millions of dollars of income. Then there are all the online providers of downloadable content trying to eek out marginal profit margins; if you can count millions of dollars as marginal. The last two players though of this complex game of power and money are the musicians themselves and us - the fans, the listeners, the purchasers of all that music.
In the last year record companies saw their CD sales fall by 20% to $7.4 Billion while Apple and its online service iTunes is estimated to sell 2.4 billion songs this year giving it about 85% of the online market. Given that it forks over 70 cents of every dollar it collects per song to the record companies Apple’s profit margin is incredibly slim but according to Eddy Cue; iTunes vice president, in a recent CNN Money interview Apple doesn’t believe that the market will bear an increase of the price per song - regardless of what the recording industry might think.
However depending on what happens this coming Thursday when the Copyright Royalty Board set the royalty rates for the next five years; the first possible increase since the online explosion, Apple may have no choice.
The record industry is asking that the fixed per song payment be scraped in favour of 8% of the wholesalers revenues. In contrast the Digital Media Association who represent online music services like Apple is seeking to get an even lower rate of 4.8 cents per song; or 6% of revenues.
There has been a rumbling that Apple would shutter the iTunes service if the record label succeed in getting their increase. Their argument being that they are making so little money under the current structure and given that they don’t believe the consumer would accept a price increase and they are in the business of 
losing money. So at this point where itunes is costing they would have no alternative but to close the service:
“If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the … royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss - which is no alternative at all,” Cue wrote. “Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.”
Apple close iTunes?
Ya .. right .. and if you believe that I have some excellent bridges for sale. They would increase the price, consumers would bitch for a little while and then it would be back to business as usual.
Have you noticed though who isn’t being included in this decision making process of royalties. That’s right - the musicians. Instead they will have to once more depend on whatever the record labels and trade associations decide to dole out after they have taken their cut of whatever ever agreements are reached. In a business that is rife with cooked books and missing royalty payments to the musicians the idea that they would see any of the possible increase in income is farcical.
Then there is us - the fans, the listeners, the purchasers.
Guess what?
We once more have the pleasure of paying more for no other reason that people like the record labels and RIAA want to shore up their power and money streams. We lose - they win.
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Mzinga Builds White Label Social Networks for Companies
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Mzinga has been around for over eight years so they’re by no means a startup. They’ve been building white label social networks for companies such as ABC, ESPN, Amex and other big time players without much fanfare or media coverage. They’ve enabled businesses to add the social media tools that we use every day inside their protective firewall.
If you go to mzinga’s site you’ll see the numbers behind their success which are staggering. They have over 14,000 communities, more than 1 billion page requests every month from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide. All impressive stats but the real measure of success is the quality of their clientele. They have a list of who’s who that continue to use their services internally as well as externally. However, because they rebrand most of these solutions to customize projects for their customers, the general public never knows who really did the fancy work. Fortunately, though, word of mouth spreads quickly from insiders so they generate the bulk of their work that way.
One of mzinga’s most popular solutions for companies is adding social media tools such as message forums and chat rooms that allow employees to brainshare and exchange ideas that are wasted otherwise. Most of the time, businesses without these tools never harvest this goldmine of information and lose out on some excellent data that could have lead the way to greater success. Mzinga prides itself on providing social tools that enable companies to communicate better internally amongst themselves as well as externally with their customers and partners.
We sat down and spoke with mzinga at the SummerMash event in Boston. You can check it out via the embed below, or grab the MP4.
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Netflix to Roll Out API Tomorrow
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
We just recieved word from multiple sources that Netflix is planning on rolling out an API tomorrow that allows access to the company’s database of over 100,000 movies. This is to include the ratings data (which is, apparently, up to over two billion ratings on file increasing at the rate of two million movie ratings per day).
The API will be free and open to commercial use, so if you decided to make an Android or iPhone app, you’re more than welcome to sell it. The API will come in three flavors: RESTful, Javascript and ATOM, with standard OAuth security.
The developer site currently requires authentication, but is going to be live tomorrow morning. All API specs and documentation should be available there. Once the specs are live, we’ll take a look at them in depth and report back any interesting details and opportunities we see.
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How to Connect Your Email Address to Your OpenID Account
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
OpenID is an excellent solution for establishing a single identity for all your online accounts, but many people haven’t even tried it yet. For some, the concept of using a URL address for a login ID instead of the traditional email address is still completely foreign.
However, Email to ID could be what the doctor ordered and what these creatures of habits need. It could also be what OpenID needs in order to expedite wide-spread acceptance as the single sign on identity standard. You can now link your email address (or several of them) to your OpenID and then use that email address (any of them) to log into any online service that supports it! The beauty rests in the simplicity of it all. Best of all, it’s all free and easy to do.
First, a little background information on this process
Email to ID is based on the EAUT (Email Address to URL Translation) protocol that allows standard email addresses to be transformed into URLs for services like OpenID. As far as concerns regarding security and who controls everything, EAUT was designed to work in a distributed fashion, so that there isn’t a single authority in charge of everything. Each email service controls how email addresses at their domain are resolved into URLs.
Even though EAUT is designed to be decentralized, it will take time for email providers to add support. In these cases, a fallback service can be used which can translate ANY email address to a URL. Relying parties can use any fallback service they wish, but Email to ID is recommended. The need for a fallback service will decrease as more email providers support EAUT natively.
Why a fallback service like Email to ID?
Emailtoid was designed as a technology prototype to act as a temporary solution to a usability problem in OpenID. Email to ID always defers to the email providers first and only falls back to the local resolution service if the email provider does not support email-to-OpenID resolution.
What’s important for Email to ID’s long-term Success?
There are a couple of things that need to happen in order for Email to ID to become a normal part of our online experience. First, OpenID needs to formally and officially support the EAUT protocol . Second, all email providers need to get on board and support OpenID and EAUT. It’s not only good for their members but for them as well so it’s really a no-brainer. The same is true for all online services and their stance regarding OpenID support - the more services that embrace OpenID, the better for us all.
How to do it
Here’s how easy it is to connect your email address with your OpenID account. It literally takes a couple of minutes. When completed we will show you how to use it with a site that supports EAUT such as Magnolia.
1. First, you’ll need an OpenID account. You might already have one because many services like AIM and LiveJournal include an OpenID for members. You can check here. If you don’t already own one then just create one from any of the official OpenID providers on that page. Popular providers include ClaimID, myOpenID, myVidoop, myID.net and VeriSign’s Personal Identity Provider.
2. Go to Email to ID and add your OpenID account along with the email address you want to associate with it. You can add multiple addresses if you want. You’ll receive an email with an access key you can enter to complete the connection or you can simply click the link in the email. Either way works fine.
That’s it, really. It’s that easy. Enter the email address and OpenID account and they’ll be connected. You can just as easily disconnect them or add another email address or change the OpenID provider should you want to do so. It’s very flexible and puts you in control.
How to use your new email to ID account on a service
Now that you’ve linked your email address with your OpenID account, you can use your familiar email address on any site that supports it. In this example, we’ll use the popular social bookmarking service, Magnolia.
1. Go to the Magnolia sign in page and enter your email address in the OpenID box instead of the usual OpenID URL.
2. You’ll be redirected to a confirmation page on your OpenID provider’s site. Click continue to complete the transaction.
3. That’s it. You’re done. No need to enter tedious profile information or even a password. Just create the screen name you want and the email address and you’re done with the sign-up process in a fraction of the time that it usually takes. Email to ID and OpenID handles all of the dirty work for you.
Final thoughts
You’ve just gotten a glimpse of what could very well be the future of online registration thanks to the OpenID single sign on identity system along with the Email to ID URL translation based on the EAUT protocol. As mentioned earlier, in order for this much improved process to become a common standard and available everywhere online more services need to support OpenID and EAUT. The good news is that increasing new services are in fact supporting OpenID. To keep up with all of the new additions to this list go to the OpenID Directory or subscribe to its RSS feed which updates constantly.
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25+ Resources for Carpooling
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
From gas prices to the environment and being able to use the carpool lane, there are many reasons to start carpooling. The question is, how do you easily find people that happen to be driving to the same destination as you? Luckily, as with almost everything in this day and age, there are Web apps to help you with this very query.
For a double whammy of savings, make sure to check out our list, Check Gas Prices Online: 11 Handy Tools to find the cheapest gas for you and your carpooling buddies to split.
General
Avego.com - Avego is a service accessible via the iPhone or an average cell phone that allows you to get rides at a moment’s notice. The service uses GPS to allow drivers and riders to find each other. Via the GPS function you get exact directions indicating where to pick up and drop people off, and also get a running tally of how much the ride costs. After the ride is over, both the driver and passenger can rate one another.
CarpoolConnect.com - Offers up international carpooling opportunities for people mainly in the USA, Canada and Europe.
CarpoolWorld.com - CarpoolWorld has been around since 2000, and continues to provide matching services for those looking for drivers and passengers. Also offers the ability to set up carpool groups for your company, club, sports team or just about anything else you can think of.
DivideTheRide.com - A carpooling site designed to get your children around to their activities. One person starts it, they invite people they trust, and then a calendar is created. Reminders are sent via email and text message.
eRideShare.com - Assists you in finding rides for daily carpooling, cross-country travel, running errands, or even to special events & club meetings.
GishiGo.com - A ride sharing system that charges $.99 for creating a post as either a driver or passenger, and allows you to post reviews of the experience after it’s over.
GoLoco.org - A social network style carpooling site that makes sure everyone pays their share of the expenses. Each mile of a proposed trip is calculated at $.50, then split between the number of people and then GoLoco receives a 10% share of the transaction.
GooseNetworks.com - A service focusing on corporate websites to allow your employees to find people they can share rides with, providing them with public transit schedules, and more.
iCarpool.com - Assists you with finding carpooling partners for work, long distance trips, events and more. Works for members in Australia, Canada, Europe and the USA.
NuRide.com - NuRide offers sponsored carpooling. Set up your ride, confirm that it actually occurred, and you can earn points towards rewards such as gift cards, discounts and more. All members must belong to a company or organization so as to remove some of the anonymity.
PickupPal.com - Sign up for carpooling for work, long trips, to events and more. Focuses heavily on reducing your carbon footprint on the Earth.
Pooln.com - A car pooling site with a social networking structure. Give it a try by entering the zip code where you live and the one for your office to see if there are any members who match up with your needs.
RideAmigos.com - Use the RideAmigo’s RideMatcher system to enter your trip or commute, and find people with a matching schedule that you can share a ride with. The service also shows the environmental impact reduction of the people sharing a ride. Also offers a corporate version, which restricts results to people within your company.
RidePro - A white label solution for companies and cities looking to set up their own carpooling site.
RoadSharing.com - Enter the route for your proposed road trip and find people to share the ride with and split the costs. Has lots of international members, and it’s easy to spot who has the vehicle and who is looking for one.
TrafficBulldog.org - Billed as a commuter advocacy site, TrafficBulldog offers up news and suggestions on reducing traffic congestion via carpooling and other suggestions.
Zimride.com - Zimride offers carpooling for just about any distance you can think of in the USA. They have a Facebook application and have already built an app to be released to work with Android.
Region Specific
511.org - The San Francisco based 511.org site provides a ride share area where you can find other commuters to pool with in the Bay area. Carpoolers get free bridge tolls during peak hours, and if you start a Vanpool, you can receive up to $900 in gas cards.
Car-Pooling.com - Offers carpool matching for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Carpool.ca - Canadians get their own carpooling site with Carpool.ca. Find rides, read up on carpooling etiquette, and other general tips.
CarpoolMatchNW.org - A carpool site focusing on Oregon and SW Washington.
Carshare.com - Carshare is a directory of carpooling services for the UK that you can look up by region or by just looking for ones that serve the entire country.
Liftshare.org - Focuses mainly on carpooling in the UK, but also offers up the chance to find walking and biking buddies.
MyRideSmart.com - Carpool matching service specific to the Atlana, GA area of the United States.
RideArrangers - In operation since 1975, RideArrangers is a program in Denver, CO focused on matching up people for carpools.
RideFinders.org - RideFinders is specific to the St. Louis area and provides an interesting incentive in the form of up to six free taxi rides a year. These can be used in case you have unforeseen circumstances that keep you from meeting up with your ride.
TheCarpool.com.au - Set up carpooling for work, school and trips for people all across Australia.
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Tootsville Launches a New Virtual World for Children and Tweens
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Tootsville is a new virtual world for children ages 6-14 that’s very similar to Disney’s online cash cows ToonTown and ClubPenguin (which they purchased for $700 million).
The reference to Disney is important to note because monetization is obviously extremely important to Tootsville. This is evident by the fact that kids cannot really do many of the fun things the site has to offer without their parents ponying up some money on a monthly or annual basis.
These premium accounts range from $5.95 per month up to $57.98 annually. Here are some of the things your kids CAN’T do unless you upgrade to a premium account: Walk on 2 legs, Dress up your toot, buy clothes or furniture, decorite your house, attend special events, collect pivitz, play premium games and safe chat with friends. I know, then what CAN they do? The answer: not a whole lot really.
Speaking of money, since the characters in Tootsville are a bunch of colorful elephants, the currency they use is in the form of peanuts. Kids get a bunch of peanuts if their parents subscribe to the more expensive premiere plans, naturally. This is important because this is what they use to buy objects such as clothes for their elephant or furniture for thier house. Some might say this is a good way to teach children the value of money and how to spend wisely.
On the positive side of things, the site is full of bright colorful worlds and loaded with activities (some are even free!). Kids can easily chat with other “toots” and checkout places together. The good news is that there are ways for kids to earn peanuts by doing certain things. For example, by going to the water fountain (see image above) and making a wish you quickly make 19 peanuts.
Tootsville’s goal is to mix educational lessons with entertainment as displayed throughout the site. The Tootering program is scheduled for release for spring 2009 and the Teacher’s Pet Program will emphasize the fun in learning, at home, and in the classroom.
If you’re a parent with children that enjoy playing online, then safe sites like Tootsville and the ones from Disney provide a service that’ll provide fun for kids and peace of mind for parents. When you look at things that way, then the small cost of membership is well worth it.
AOL Dusts Off AIM for Mac with a Visual Refresh and a Beta Tag
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
This week’s release of AIM for Mac 1.0 Beta might strike some as strange, given the fact that it’s 2008 and Mac OS X users have had years to grow accustomed to things like Apple’s iChat client and third-party creations like Adium, both of which have support for the protocol. But AOL insists that it is “one of the most requested applications from our users.” Because AIM for iPhone has been a popular download, apparently.
To be frank, there isn’t anything thoroughly impressive about this release - at least not in the way of outstanding features. While the company offers a Windows-friendly client that provides things like VoIP and video chat, as with many other messaging services on the Web, including Skype, users of AIM for Mac 1.0 Beta will have to remain satisfied with file transfers, AIM groups and AIM Blast groups and connections to AOL mailboxes and so forth (Just to note, personal experience has routinely shown the inability to successfully transfer files via AIM.).
If nothing else, AIM for Mac 1.0 Beta can simply be thought of as an option for those Mac users searching for AOL branding and find its heavily aged and underdeveloped predecessor, AIM 4.7 for Macintosh, too old and too tired and not thematically sufficient to run with other Tiger- and Leopard-level applications with at least some semblance of visual congruity.
Bloombla Puts Your Life Story in Line With the World’s (The Startup Review)
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Company Name:
20-word Description:
Bloombla is connecting the world together by things you’ve done in your life. It’s a fun and addictive way of sharing your experiences and seeing how they fit with the rest of the world.
CEO’s Pitch:
Bloombla is all about you, your life, your stories and everyone around you. We let our users share their stories with friends, get connected with others around the world who have shared your experiences, view their stories and tell your own. Users can browse friends profiles, read of their adventures and learn things they never knew about them before. Our search allows you to find people who have not only done something you may be interested in but also read their thoughts. It could be about a product they purchased, a place they’ve been to, an event they attended and the list goes on. Every Bloom becomes a rich source of useful information. The possibilities are endless.
Mashable’s Take:
I have to admit, the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw Bloombla was the face of TV staple Jon Stewart and universal acronym “NAMBLA,” a term parodied on The Daily Show for many years. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, Bloombla has no correlation to this bit of humor. But no matter, the service is pretty interesting all the same.
It’s hard to pin Bloombla as something specific. You might call it a Twitter clone, or some sort of Digg-like system. Or you can call it a new-age story telling service. Or all those things in one.
Twitter is fairly generic in that you can basically do what you wish with an account, provided that you keep to a 140-character per message limit. Digg, meanwhile, is sort of a groupthink linking engine. It’s very much about promoting topics, whatever those topics might be. It’s also grown into quite a noisy environment for armchair commenters everywhere. (You decide whether that’s good or bad.)
Bloombla is a kind of blend of the three, except that it also maintains some measure of independence, too. Does it sound convoluted? It’s very simple, actually. In short, you describe what you’ve done, whatever it might be. Did you attend a concert somewhere? Let the membership know. Traveled somewhere exciting? Say so. Your options are endless, really. And, if other users have done the same, they can make note of it by clicking the “done it!” button. Also, comments can be made on an individual activity page, giving Bloombla a sort of organized view of the lives of multiple users. The more members participate in the conversation, the more fruitful and interactive the Bloombla forum becomes.
Of course, the engine is only so powerful, and cannot intelligently distinguish what it is you’ve written and a similar mention made, say, a week or a month earlier, a la the Digg duplicate feature. Yet it is still a more elegant design than the activity stream of your average Twitter roll. Again, organized is perhaps the best way to phrase it. (It should be said that a search feature allows you to find talk items that you want to engage with.)
Now, you might not want to adopt Bloombla if you’re set in your ways on Twitter. Habits are a hard thing to break, after all, and there’s no reason to make the jump if you’re happy where you are. But if you happen to be searching for something different, something where you can get closer with those you know (there’s a quick way to bring your friends from Facebook into the fold) and even some people you haven’t met but maybe have had similar experiences as your own (and vice versa), Bloombla is an exceptional new service to try out.
It does takes some basic learning. For instance, you’re advised to write your “blooms” in the three spaces provided in the main message bar. This can seem strange. But so it goes. On the whole, I consider Bloombla a solid debut, and one of those inventions that finds itself a decent-sized niche in the ever-widening world of microblogging.
Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials
ZooToo Offers “Social Pet-working” for Pet Lovers
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
ZooToo calls itself a “social pet-working” service that connects pet-lovers all over. It is a unique site, that’s for sure. Once you sign up you add your pets to your profile. I was impressed by the vast variety of animal types and breeds they provided during this process. Here are my two pets:
There are a great deal of useful features and services on the site. For example, when you enter your zip code ZooToo will be able to show you a map of all the pet related services in your area. This includes local vets, animal shelters, Animal rescue centers, groomers and many more. The other great thing about this feature is that they are all rated by other ZooToo members.
You can also find all kinds of useful pet products that are also rated by the ZooToo community. The products are searchable and arranged according to type of animal. There’s a Craigslist type of classified section for more pet-related products.
One of the best things about the site is the way that it engages the community to get involved with good causes such as Animal Shelter makeovers. They’re gearing up for their second annual event that will helped out about 20 shelters last time around.
The social networking part of the site comes into play with the member profiles and groups feature. You can make friends with local pet-lovers according to your zip code. You can even search for people who like the same kind of pets that you do. For example, you can find fellow Poodle lovers who live close by. As for the groups feature, you can join a group for just about every kind of animal lover there is. These areas are helpful for pet related events, parties or fundraiser that you might want to conduct.
The Answers area provides a healthy amount of information for any pet question or concern you might have. It’s like a Yahoo Answers for animals. It’s a great way to learn more about your pets and how to take better care of them. You can also answer questions and become known as the resident expert on the subject because there’s a rating system for all Q&A activities.
Speaking of rating systems, every member of ZooToo earns points for things they do on the site and in their own local community for pets. You earn more bonus points with everything you do online and offline for animals which is a nice way to encourage people to get more involved.
At first, I thought this was a silly idea - social pet-working? However, once I signed up and started using the service I soon discovered that despite the cuteness and cleverness, they are serious about helping pets and pet-owners. It’s actually a smart way to connect pet owners with services that cater to the needs of animals.
