My Zaadz Wish List for the holiday Season

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