Welcome zaadzsters (or whoever you are)

My name is Aaron and I'm the head web developer here at zaadz... Well, actually, you can call me the CEO (Chief Experience Officer) since I do much more than web developing. (I also toss energy balls around the room)

zaadz has been live for about 2 weeks now, so if you're reading this close to the date it was posted, you're one of the lucky souls who can really be called one of the first members of the site that will change the world. More on that later...

In the meantime, notice the little "beta" tag underneath the sparkly zaadz logo at the top of the page. That means that we're still testing things and I happen to be taking full advantage of that fact right now. So if you encounter some bugs or weirdnesses, feel free to report them, but know that we're probably aware of it.

These past weeks, we've been scrambling to get as much done as we can so we can get you guys the tools you need to express yourselves. We'll get to making everything super sparkly a little bit later down the road... and you can't even imagine what kind of sparklies we have planned... muahahahaha

In addition to my blog which will be covering tech development, you might want to keep tabs on Brian's blog. He is the other CEO and does important things like... raise money =D

Well, I just wanted to do my short intro and let you know what's up. We've got lots of things planned but please feel free to let us know what you want to see. You can leave us feedback via that lovely feedback link at the bottom of your screen. You can also leave comments here for me.

I love you and hope to get to know all of you better. seriously...

And yes, I know the delete button in the mail still isn't working

-A

My goodness!

Well, first of all, I have to send out a big thank you to coolmel and his very flattering blog post about zaadz. This is just the kind of feedback that we love and crave.

Of course, mel brought up two very interesting topics. One about our business (translation: financial) strategy and the other about new functionality. By business partner and good friend Brian would be more than happy to chew on the financial question (he thinks about it at least 17 hours every day) so I'll let him address that one.

As for the feature sets, yes, we are listening... One of the problems being the CEO (Chief Experience Officer) is that there are so many ideas bumping around in my head and I can only do so much in a day. (usually those days are 17 hour days as well)

Right now I'm caught between making some improvements to the core architecture of the site that will fuel future development and launching fun things immediately to keep the flow of new tools and features coming on to the site. I'll skip the details of the architectural stuff because, frankly, it's boring (unless you're interested in techno-babble) and get straight to the list of new features that we are planning to launch sometime between now and the first month or two of the new year:

• Photos in Blogs: We're cooking up a way to manage your photos so that you can easily drop them into your blogs and also have them connect back to your photos section.
  
• Content Access: Mark your content as private, public or community accesible. This way you'll be able to keep some of your content restricted to your own "inner circle".
• Tagging Madness: Tags exist right now but they don't do a whole lot yet. Look for some major improvements to the tagging interface. Tag everything and then search for content locally, globally or within your community of friends.
• Blog Improvements: Along with the photos, we'll be adding categories, archives, recent posts, calendar and all of the other features you'd expect from a blogging tool.
• Favorites: Mark blog posts, photos or quotes as favorites so you can come back to them later.
• Friend Categories: Got a bunch of people you don't know asking to be your friend? Categorize em: soulmates, friends, family, lovers, weird integral people
  

and the big one...

• Modular Web Sites

I've actually been dreaming about this for a while but the idea is that we're going to give all of you the ability to build your own multiple-page web presnece and drop your content wherever you want it to go... blog here, photos here, blurb here, event listing here, etc.

This is where all of the fun stuff comes in because we can start building modules to let you integrate your other blogs, flickr photos, del.icio.us links, etc.

We'll also (at some point) allow you to pick a different template for your personal site and maybe even give you the tools to customize your own.

We're excited about this stuff and a million other things that we plan on launching in the new year... I'm sure we'll have more time to talk about it later but just to whet your appetite: zaadz events, zaadz match, zaadz yellow pages, zaadz groups, zaadz business sites =O and more...

As always feel free to leave your comments here and keep sending us feedback via that little feedback link at the bottom of the screen. For more tech news, also be sure to visit Ryan's blog. He's another one of the wizards here at zaadz ;)

That's all for now... maybe when we speak next time I'll have figured out how to integrate this into the blog tool.

Peace

-A