We haven’t been posting much lately so you may have thought we were just enjoying the sun! Well….not quite We’ve actually been working on the new Ziki interface and a new homepage!

Why a new interface? Mainly because we’re working on new functionalities and we needed a bit more space so that it’s not all crammed together. The next major functionality will be the Ziki content search engine. At the moment, you can search through the personal content gathered on your Ziki. The next step is to allow you to expand your search to the content of your reading list and network, as well as to the content of the Ziki community.

So, let’s go back to the new interface. On the right column we’ve allowed more space to display the tags of a Ziki owner, as it’s an important part of his/her description. Then, on the top right bloc we now display your interests, so that you can immediately see people with similar interests. As for the other links and info previously on the right column they’ve all been moved to the left column.

In terms of new features, you’ll see we’ve added a few ones. First you can now send a private message to someone directly from his/her Ziki via “Contact this person”. Second, on the left column you’ll see a “last visitors” link, which tells you who last had a look at your Ziki profile. No more anonymous “lurkers” ! As for the number of “hits” it gives you the number of page views of a Ziki. Third, you can now invite your friends to join your Ziki network and have them directly added as one of your contact when they register . Simply click on “invite your friends” under “promote my Ziki”. Finally, we’ve added a link “subscribe to this Ziki”. Just click on it to get the RSS feed you need to add to your newsreader to get this Ziki latest updates. More to come on this topic. Another planned feature: a direct subscription to a Ziki through email.

So we hope you’ll like the new design. Don’t hesitate to tell us what you think and whether or not it’s easy to find your way around.

We’ve been recently testing a Google AdWords campaign on some Zikis and here is some “heads up” on how it’s going and what we’re trying to accomplish.

We purchased sponsored links on some names to get the corresponding Zikis listed at the top of their Google search results page. What we are trying to do here is find the best way to manage one’s online identity.

People are searching for you on the net. We want to make sure they find the right information first! Your Ziki is your personal web page to tell about yourself and assemble your digital life. So we thought, what’s better than getting your Ziki listed at the top of the search results page to control what people find when “googling” your name?

Of course it’s also a way to promote our service, but instead of spending our marketing budget only promoting Ziki, we’re trying to have our users benefit from it too. Before doing it full scale though, we prefered to test it on a limited number of Zikis, hoping the results would tell us whether or not to expand it to other active users.

The good news is that we’re very happy so far with the outcome of this campaign. Those of you for whom we purchased sponsored links have mainly reacted very positively to the initiative. So it’s reinforced in us the idea that we should expand it to all active Ziki users. We’re currently seeing how we can automate the process and allow you to customize the content of your ads. We’re not quite there yet…But stay tuned. With this post we wanted to keep you in the loop on what we’re doing. So more info to come! In the meantime don’t hesitate to tell us what you think!