Translated from patrick chassany’ s post on April 30, 2008

Two years ago Olivier and I decided to jump and start Ziki.com. Then Jean-Francois and Severine joined us. I have to confess that on top of everything it is a fantastic human experience and I have learnt a lot from this enterprise (and I still now..). This was the first time I started a free service on the internet and in fact it ended up being more complex than I thought; it became clear that free members are as demanding as paying ones. We are just emerging from a long development phase, which was necessary to bring many improvements in the navigation and design of the site; I hope we were successful in bringing to our users a service which is simple to use. Our ambition was to make sure that anyone could access it and use it.

We gave priority to public information over private one, resulting into transparent promotions of some of our members within the network …We gave priority to quality over quantity, access to information over presentation; syndication and synchronization over publishing tools; we gave priority to free networking between members. From the beginning we made choices that were different from other companies but now when we look at what the other social network are doing, we know we were ahead of our time.

Out of the 50,000 registered members, more than 6,000 people and businesses benefit from our visibility, reputation and identity management program on the internet through a free advertising campaign which guaranty them a top ranking on Google.

It took us more than 1 year to understand what motivates people and businesses to be active on the internet, what they expect from a service like Ziki.com and from that experience how to craft an innovative service to fulfill their needs.

Today it is time to go to the next challenge: turning Ziki.com into a viable business. This month we are going to launch our premium service and offer to people and businesses a ranking service payable on an annual basis, which will be a unique offering on the market.

As of today thousands of businesses are not visible on the internet or don’t get displayed on Google search pages. This is what Ziki.com is about: to increase the visibility of businesses on the internet through innovative online services customized for each member.

See you soon on Ziki.com and be visible!

Companies registered with Ziki can click on “My Ads” tab and check the box to authorize Ziki to start their advertising campaign to get them at a top rank on Google pages.

We offer our ranking service to companies for a 30-day period to test the performance of our service. This offer is capped to 10 € .

Enroll with this free offer during the beta version. As usual we invite you to give your feedback here or on your blogs. We love feedbacks and they allow us to improve our service for your benefit

This will also help you to research more precisely amongst your contacts and other Ziki users:

Update your Ziki in order to meet new people and get even better linked with your community.

And if you think that there’s missing something in the list, give us a call

To add your widgets just follow the link in the menu and paste the code to the textfield. If you’d like to display several widgets, up to you to select an order.

A last tip: like on your blog, you’d rather chose to display smaller widgets in order to respect the layout of your Ziki and not to alter your visitors’ reading experience.

You can chose between about 20 stylish card designs which have been specially created for our members. You’ll find a traditional web 1.0 version featuring your contact data, the web 2.0 card with your favorite personal tags or the more orginal web 3.0 edition which indicates the URL of your Ziki profile only

Your business cards are already waiting for you from now on and you’ll get them for free - you just have to pay the postal fees (USD 5,90 for standard delivery or USD 7,20 by DHL).

The cards are available both from the US and UK. Just follow the links and have fun!

Here is Christophe’s post, where you can get more info on the application. If you are connected with a mobile device you can access the application here or here.

In this (beta) version of the application you can use Ziki’s people search engine or display user profiles. You may also download your contact’s VCard directly to your phone.

Hava a look on Christophe’s blog if you’d like to know more (once again easier accessible for our French speaking readers )

Thomas Bouron, who prefers to call himself Tomtom, a Dotclear specialist, was the first to bring out a plugin based on Ziki’s API. His application enables you to display your Ziki profile on your Dotclear V1 blog, or to look up other Ziki users’ profiles as well as their contacts, favorites, connections, stats or RSS feeds through the integrated search engine.
To implement this plugin you only have to run Dotclear version 1 and PHP 5. Have a look on Thomas’ blog to get a nice overview of his plugin’s features. He nearly completely reproduces the content of his Ziki profile for his readers.

For more information and the downloads please check out his blog.

Only a few days after, a similar plugin for Wordpress was released. Its author, Nicolas Hennion, also called Nicolargo, simply called it “ZikiPlugin” and lets us discover version 0.3 of his code. Thanks to Nicolas’ plugin, you may easily integrate your Ziki profile into the sidebar of your Wordpress blog. The current version allows you to show your picture with a link to your personal Ziki, your username as well as your first and last names and the various links displayed on your profile.

Of course, you’ll find more information and the download links on the author’s blog (which is more easily accessible for French speaking readers…).

We are sure that these two plugins are only the first examples of using the Ziki API and their authors are already considering new releases with complementary features. If you have any interesting ideas, don’t hesitate to contact them or, if you ever you feel ready, start developing your own Ziki API based application! We would be glad to present it on our blog soon!

Olivier combined two new services available on your dashboard which from now on allow you to follow closely the activity of your network. Thanks to this new tool you’ll obtain a better view on the social exchanges of your favorite contacts.

Here is a screenshot of my own notification board:

You’ll also find a real-time update of all the contents produced by your network:

A great number of our members produce or qualify content through different media services (blogs, bookmarks, twitter, flickr, etc.). From now on you can keep in close contact with your network and explore new content every day directly from your dashboard!

So, what are you still doing here? Keep an eye on your network!

vCard is a file format which has been developed in order to exchange contact data digitally. Thus, vCards are some sort of electronic business cards which are often attached to email messages but can also be handed on through other chanels such as Ziki suggests to do it.

The content of your vCard sticks perfectly with the way that you’ve set up your Ziki. For instance, if only your contacts are enabled to see your personal contact details, they are also the only ones to be able to download your vCard. If you want your contact details to be available for anyone through Ziki, your vCard will be published too. Like everytime with Ziki, you chose how to share your information and to which limit.

Of course, you may also download your vCard anytime you like as an attachement for your emails.