Zoopy launches

| Posted March 6th, 2007 by bryn

Zoopy is a new South African (why no .co.za?) media site which launched today. I'm not sure where I heard about it (probably off someone's blog), and am not sure who's behind it ("3 under 30s", according to the site), but I thought I'd take down some observations:

First, I'm not excited by the appearance: it's better than, to draw a name from the hat, MySpace, but not up to scratch when compared with the current herd of W2.0 community-oriented sites. The page layout hardly fascinates, and they don't seem to have realized that when fixed background images and variable text size come together, bad things happen - hit the site and bring your font size up a couple of notches to see what I mean. They've gone with serif fonts which, unless used with subtlety, seem a little... old. And there's a weird disjuncture between the cartoony mascot and the occasional iPod-like silhouettes used on, for example, the register page.

I'll try and avoid mentioning the table-based layout and crappy Javascript.

Account creation is relatively easy, although it won't allow "spaces or special characters" in your password; not sure what their thinking was there. After registering, you're dumped to a dashboard containing your current media contributions and the upload links. Aha! This is nice and easy, thought I. Rather than enduring a two hour wait for a video to upload, I posted a photo. All goes well until the redirect, which drops me at another image upload form with no framing. Unusual design choice. Ah, the upload forms are in frames, and something went wrong - I'd been redirected to the form URL after the image upload, presumably, failed. Navigating my way back to the dashboard, and yes, it seems that the image hasn't been loaded at all! Bug? First-day-server blues? After trying again, I gave up. Obviously there are a few problems to work out.

Viewing photos seems to work - although there's no way to see the original image, and the current image appears in the 'related content' view. Security-wise, there is no HTML escaping in the comment fields. Someone else can go see if we can get SQL in there... On the video side, they play, but I haven't investigated too deeply; it seems that the video can only buffer while playing, rather than in paused state, so you land up either watching a terribly jumpy stream, or being bugged by bursts of noise in the background while you let the video load in another tab. (Correction! That was just my connection. Videos load when paused.)

There's very little content available, this isn't surprising - the site has just launched. But what is the motivation for people to add new content to a buggy system when there are well-proven services like YouTube available? In fact, why a South African photo/movie service, instead of, say, a 'South Africa' tag on one of the larger sites? I guess there would be some advantage if Zoopy was hosted in South Africa, as it'd be faster and not chew up international bandwidth. I'm not sure where they are hosted, but knowing something about the prices involved in ZA hosting, I suspect its sitting somewhere cheaper.

As you've probably picked up, this hasn't made a very good impression on me. I was expecting, well, hoping for, a really good implementation. There are so few people currently doing anything of this nature in South Africa, but I think just one slick, usable and beautiful service could help start changing that. This is not that service. If they'd left out a bunch of cruft (channels, for example; tags are available - implement channels at a later point), focused on the core functionality, brought in a really good designer, and launched with all the little things like working uploads, Zoopy would be in a far stronger position, from which it would have the room to expand.

Postscripts:

You do not write sites like this in PHP. You'll remember that in a year.
What is ZA-specific content? Someone mentioned citizen journalism, which strikes me as a really good idea. The danger is that it'd become quite a downer (yes, that's my afro-negativism (; ), but more substantial than singing mice and cats doing hilarious things.
From the about:
Offensive material
We try to keep a balanced viewpoint on what’s appropriate for the community but we rely on you to step forward if something offends you. Whenever you come across a photo or video that you think shouldn’t be there, let us know immediately by clicking on the “I find this offensive” button under the off-putting video or photo and the item will be unpublished straight away and sent through to Zoopy HQ for review.
Content is going to be a real problem if every South African on the web can just click at 'I find this offensive' buttons. Really.

bryn's blog

Comments

Hi Bryn Phew, what a read :)

On March 7th, 2007 Jason (not verified) says:

Hi Bryn

Phew, what a read :) Firstly, thanks for taking the time to really take a thorough first-look at our site. Replied to your mail last night as well.
We'll take all your comments into consideration, but a few things to say in reply:

- We do have the co.za but after focus-group testing, Zoopy.com (like thunda.com, kulula.com and so on) stood out as the stronger brand. Not to mention that it fits nicely into the bigger picture we have that we're building behind the scenes as we speak. But of course, like all good business people, we own the co.za domain (and about 320 others - including typos, .mobi, .tv etc.).

- Regarding appearance issues, we had to draw a line in the sand and go live at some stage. We could've stayed in closed beta until Zoopy V2 design was complete (about 60% of the way there now), but with interested pockets of users all over the place urging us to go live, we took the decision to take the site public in Live Beta. I can assure you that V2 will answer all your issues - and more - in this department. More ajax, better use of space and some very useful new and unique functionality. Every site on the planet had a first version. This is ours. So don't write us off just yet.

- Regarding performance issues, I'm not sure why you weren't able to upload a photo. Other users have been doing so and we've retested again today - all seems fine. Please try again. Will pass this through to the dev team nonetheless. As for escaping comments and such, this is in the top 10 on our buglist, but we wanted to make the average user happy with basic functionality first. Now that things are up, we can start dealing with mysql injection vulnerabilities and such like.

- Regarding offensive material, two things here. First, South African parents and schools are very concerned at the recent Mxit scenario and in our focus groups, it put everyone's mind at ease to know that offensive material is immediately unpublished and then reviewed (and possibly republished if deemed to be appropriate) by our editorial team. Second, we haven't had a single offensive report yet. And if we do have the odd loon who finds it amusing to mark things inappropriate, we can take things from there. For now, the feedback is that people are pleased that hardcore porn won't be sitting on our site for 12 hours after they report it offensive. In fact, chances are that more people would abuse the site with this type of material if we didn't do the auto unpublish thing. Given the choice of two evils, we went with the one that kept the majority happy.

Overall, we're having a good time. We're home-grown ... we didn't buy script off the shelf for $199 and trying to grow a site that gives a South African flavour to videos and photos. No one said you didn't have to keep your YouTube account. But if you want to see South African content (or content that interests South Africans) and take part in South African competitions and events (to come), then why not expand your profile list to include one more at Zoopy?

All the best. Please keep the comments and feedback coming.

Jason
Zoopy HQ

Hi Jason, First, sorry for

On March 8th, 2007 bryn says:

Hi Jason,

First, sorry for being so brutal - as a programmer, I get sensitive about code. And appearance, apparently.

Seems perfectly reasonable.

Again, this makes sense. My personal approach would have been, as I said, to try and launch a first version with a well-polished core, rather than a comprehensive but problematic site; basically, this is a working of the old 'first impression' idiom: I believe that you may lose more mindshare by taking the route you did. But I'm not the one putting the work in, so I'm sure you had good reasons.

I think the photo uploading problem may be a Flash issue - a quick glance through the code revealed the existence of some kind of Flash uploader. I just checked again, and I still get the same problem; its probably stemming from the fact that I'm running Firefox (with the Flash 9 plugin) under Ubuntu, rather than Windows or Mac.

Regarding injection, I'd regard that as the number one bug on any top-ten list (; PHP is not known for being forgiving around security.

My comment here was more of a tongue-in-cheek observation regarding the tendency of some South Africans to be very easily offended, rather than an actual complaint (;

Thanks for the reply, and all the best as you push the project forward. I'll definitely have another look after V2.

Cheers,
Bryn

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Hi Bryn! Thanks for

On March 8th, 2007 Jason (not verified) says:

Hi Bryn!

Thanks for publishing our reply. And for your reply to our reply...

There's absolutely nothing wrong with being brutal, if what you're saying is honest and helpful. Your comments were both.
We appreciate the time you took in going through everything in detail, with some very specific points for improvement.

Thanks to you our comment submissions are now safe and sound :) And we're now on the road to testing core functionality in Ubuntu.

I hope you'll stick around and help us make the road to V2 a smoother ride for everyone? Please try more, play more and write to us more. If nothing else, there's a R250 Kalahari voucher in it for you :) That and the cosy feeling of knowing you helped make Zoopy a better place for all South Africans :)

Hope to see you soon!

Jason

domain vs brand

On March 13th, 2007 alan (not verified) says:

re this statement: We do have the co.za but after focus-group testing, Zoopy.com (like thunda.com, kulula.com and so on) stood out as the stronger brand.

ok look guys, zoopy.com is a domain name (or web app, if you like), and it will take many many years (and tons either money or insight) before it enters the realm of a brand, you can take my word for that. so you might as well stop bantering that term around the boardroom, and the internet.

Zoopy is an online and

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Zoopy is an online and mobile social media community, hosting user generated poker videos, photos, audio and notes. It launched into closed beta in late 2006 and moved into live beta with public access on 5 March 2007. Zoopy has attracted some high profile users women's shoes, including Helen Zille (Leader of the Democratic Alliance and Mayor of Cape Town), Grant Haskin (Deputy Mayor of Cape Town), Habitat for Humanity and Zapiro (cartoonist and satirist Jonathan Shapiro). Users can create their own watches profile, which then allows them to create, upload and share videos, photos, podcasts and blogs all in one place. Zoopy TV is a separate platform within Zoopy that broadcasts videos created by Zoopy's content team on topics ranging from news to rings vox pops interviews and entertainment.

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