What's coming...

I just wanted to let everyone know that we are working on an 'enterprise' solution that we think will meet the needs of larger organizations while keeping it easy for an end user to interact within and among many networks. Our thanks to the many organizations that have helped/are helping us think through these requirements. Stay tuned.

Elegantly Serving Simple and Complex Needs

When we began development on ZLoop two years ago one of our goals was to create an application that could serve both very simple, short term small group interaction needs, as well as the complex, long term interaction needs of multi-thousand person networks. We wanted to design the “loop” in such a way that it would accommodate any number of people, for any period of time while handling any volume of potential interaction. When you use ZLoop, you will find that the system has been designed to move from simple to complex usage in an elegant manner. Creating a loop takes 2 clicks and about 10 seconds so that it is functional for purposes as simple as say, sharing and interacting around a single set of pictures. To a new user, this ease of use can conceal ZLoop’s advanced functionality, or at least can cause users to not suspect it is there. But dig a little deeper and you will discover a host of options and features that let you set up your loop the way you want and ensure that it continues to capture and organize interaction in a useful manner even at very high levels of usage.

I have highlighted a few of these advanced features below:

1. Loop Customization

When you create a loop it has a number of modules/tools/applications laid out according to our default arrangement. But click the “Edit this page” link and you will find that you can drag and drop those applications around the page and can even add additional applications to your loop. Furthermore, you can upload a customized header to the top of the loop to give it your own branding.

2. Content Display/Sort Options

Content within most of the applications is set to display according to ‘Recently Active’ by default. Within the “Edit this page” section you can change the content display setting for each module to a number of different options in order to customize how content is being displayed on your loop home and within each application.

3. Membership Management

Use the “Membership” link to make members Administrators of the loop, transfer ‘ownership’ of the loop to a particular Administrator, or to remove users from the loop who are misbehaving or no longer belong in the loop. Administrators can help customize and edit the loop, they can edit, delete, and otherwise manage any contributed content, and they can manage the members, remove members, etc.

4. Labelling

Just about everything that is added to a loop can be labeled in order to categorize and organize loop content. Users can label things as they add them, but as an admin, you may edit any content you wish in order to label or re-label an item. Furthermore, you can pre-set what labels you want to emphasize in the loop by clicking the “Label editor” link and creating labels, setting certain labels as “Preferred” and deleting unwanted or unused labels. You can use labels to create categories within each of the applications. For instance, create preferred labels for ‘Classifieds’, ‘Introductions’, and ‘Just for Fun’ and your Conversations Application will soon have those categories for people to choose from and sort by.

5. Linking Loops

By using the “Linked Loops” application, you can give members in a central loop instant access to any other loops you choose. Other members can also post links to their loops, but as the loop owner or administrator you can choose to keep or delete any linked loop. As with all content types, you can feature the key linked loops that you want people to see and have priority access to.

We want to make sure people don’t miss ZLoop’s powerful underlying capabilities because of our focus on simplicity.

An Interesting Test Case

One of the largest and most active early ‘alpha’ communities on ZLoop is made up of folks in their late teens to late twenties, nearly all of whom use either Facebook or MySpace on a regular basis. In fact, this same community has a facebook group that has been around quite a bit longer than the ‘loop’ has. The Facebook group has nearly 700 members, while the Loop currently has around 500 members. What is most interesting to us is the difference in the level of activity, because we think it confirms how groups on social networking sites are and are not being used. While the Facebook group has been around for nearly twice as long as the loop, to date it has just 10 conversations and 50 contributed pictures. On the other hand, the loop that was created for this community has over 250 conversations and nearly 500 pictures that have been contributed already!! This does not count the dozens of events, files, and linked loops that have been contributed as well.

This appears to confirm our observation that 99% of the groups on social networking sites are mainly used for promotional purposes, and the level of activity happening between members in those groups is very low. Groups are good promotional tools and are used by users to establish an ‘association’ with something, but are inadequate methods for facilitating community activity and interaction. We believe groups fall short for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to: The lack of contextual separation (not wanting everyone in a community to see your ‘social networking life’), poor scaling in regards to content (the organization of lots of contributed content), no interactivity between group members unless they are 'friends', and privacy and ownership issues that real world community leaders deal with when considering putting their community on a social networking site.

If you are a community, network, or team leader, I encourage you to jump on ZLoop and explore our solution to the above problems, and others.