The Ziki team is wishing you a happy new year! All the best for 2009!

We thank you all for your trust and loyalty. 2009 is going to be a year full of enhancements including the launch of new offers to enrich our market place!

Of course we will keep you updated and we hope to see you soon on this blog and on Ziki!

All the best
The Ziki team

Ziki.com is reinventing itself and we are introducing a platform to connect buyers and sellers, starting with internet service providers. Since Ziki was launched in 2006 we’ve indeed attracted numerous internet service providers (design, website creation, emailing, seo, sem….). So it seems natural to target this category first by offering tools fitting their needs to help them grow sales and revenues.

Our goal , no matter how large your company or your budget are, is to allow you to gain new customers and grow your sales quickly, simply, efficiently and at least cost.

So we’re actively working on the new services of our marketplace. Ziki will offer to buyers free services to find the best supplier, and to sellers, sales development solutions to acquire new customers.

To know more about the services we’re working on, login to your account and click on the “my campaigns” and “my suppliers” tabs. You’ll also find more info in our “about” section.

Also our original service - listing of your name or your company name on Google - is still available and will be soon completed by other services to generate targeted traffic to your website (on a pay per click basis)

We”ll keep you informed as our solutions are ready. We’ll be addressing the French market first and expanding to other markets in the course of 2009, so we’ll keep you posted. But you can already receive quote requests through your public company page. And referring buyers to you is free until January 2009. So make the most of it and get your company listed as a supplier if you’ve not done so already!

Stay tuned! More news coming soon!

Ziki.com is 2 years old !

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!

This is a major step: starting now companies can enroll our Google ranking service to enhance their search engine positioning in 1 click.

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

Ziki permanently tries to simplify your user interface. Today we’d like to present a new feature to you which will help you to communicate your personal interests in an easier way. Only if you indicated to be interested by finding a job with Ziki we’ll keep your old tags in your biography.From now on you may select your interests within a list of about 30 common domaines:

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

Some of you may have noticed a new link in the left sidebar: “Widgets”. From now on it’s possible to add your personal widgets to the left sidebar of your Ziki in the same way as you are used to do it on your blog. For instance, you can add your favorite songs to a playlist accessible for all visitiors of your site by adding a Deezer.com or Last.fm widget. If you’d like to share your Google Events Calaendar, your Twitter widget, your Zlio shop, your favorite books on Amazon.com, your ebay ads or your Criteo blogroll, everything’s possible!

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.

Ziki is now supporting OpenSearch. So it’s now possible to install the Ziki’s Search Engine directly into the search bar of your firefox, your Internet Explorer 7 or any browser compatible with OpenSearch. Here is a video that explain how it’s working.

We are glad to announce our new partnership with ooprint.com (ooprint.co.uk) which enables us to offer you 100 Ziki business cards for free!

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!

Thanks to Christophe Vergne (who calls himself Shadowkris) for this new API based tool. It allows us to display Ziki on our mobile phones.

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 )

Not even two months ago we launched our Ziki API and the first plugins are already born.

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!

We have been working on it for a while, finally it’s out: Ziki launched the network activity board!

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!

This new feature has been on our roadmap for a while now and we are really glad to present it to you today. Within the Contact Details area of your Ziki (just follow the Contact Details link in the left side menu of your dashboard) you may find a brand new link called “Download as vCard”. You will find the same link on all pages which display your contact details for another Ziki member.

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.

Después de unos cuantos meses organizándolo, por fin hemos lanzado el “Curso especializado en metodologías de usabilidad” que impartirá Eduardo Manchón en Málaga el fin de semana del 1 y 2 de abril.

El curso está enfocado a la formación de profesionales en consultoría de usabilidad. Se realizarán tests de usabilidad con usuarios reales y se entregará el material del curso en papel y en formato digital.

Además del curso de Manchón, que ya ha impartido en varias ocasiones con mucho éxito, daremos unas horitas de clase sobre accesibilidad web: ventajas, marco legal y relación con la usabilidad.

El precio será de 550 € por persona (con descuentos del 20% para estudiantes y empresas que inscriban a varios empleados).

Nos hemos abierto una cuenta en Flickr (una aplicación web de almacenamiento y categorización de fotografías) para ir subiendo las fotos relacionadas con ávidos.

Como de momento no hay subidas muchas fotos, podéis ojear también nuestras cuentas personales:

• missha
• joseflorido

O la cuenta llamada detalles, donde vamos subiendo capturas interesantes de interfaces web (es un complemento al blog).

Hemos montado con drupal un agregador de blogs sobre televisión: teleplaneta.com

Aún le quedan unos días de retoques, pero ya está más o menos presentable.

Gracias a Manuel por la ayuda con Drupal :)

¿Quién no ha tenido una bici Orbea de pequeño? Son todo un clásico! Así que cuando nos llamó Íñigo Guiroy para contarnos que había montado una empresa (wegetit) y nos preguntó si queríamos trabajar con ellos en el rediseño de la página web de la empresa vasca de fabricación de bicicletas, a pesar de lo liados que estamos este mes, no hemos podido decir que no.

Ellos nos pasan la estructura y una definición de la linea de diseño (una portada, una interior y definidos los elementos de interfaz más comununes: formularios, tablas, paginación…) y nosotros nos ocuparemos de la maquetación con estándares web e integración con el gestor de contenidos.

Además, el trabajo incluye que la página sea vea perfectamente en PDAs. ¡Nuestro primer encargo de diseño web adaptado a dispositivos móviles! Ya os iremos contando en ring :)

Por cierto, mucha suerta a Íñigo e Iñaki con wegetit :)

Repasando el disco duro de ávidos he encontrado varios juegos, videos y proyectos de estos dos últimos años que, por diversos motivos, al final no terminamos. Pero para que tampoco se pierdan en el olvido, hemos creado una nueva categoría dónde iremos poniendo las ideas, trabajos y proyectos que al final no salieron.

Quien sabe, quizá algún día retomemos alguno de esos proyectos a medio hacer. En realidad, nos encanta seguir el consejo de nuestro amigo Jesús Gollonet (en su post ¡Publica!:

Todos tenemos un cajón de geniales ideas, bocetos, proyectos, canciones, diseños, artículos, experimentos… Si no eres capaz de publicarlos, distribuirlos, y hacer que se conozcan, básicamente no existen. Orientate a publicar. Sácalos.

Ya.com va a rediseñar la sección de su portal donde ofrece servicios de revelado de fotos y nos ha encargado la maquetación con estándares web.

Lo malo es que el trabajo tendrá que estar listo a finales de agosto, así que adiós a las vacaciones este mes… Habrá que esperar a septiembre ;)

Vamos a maquetar unas 40 plantillas con CSS y marcado (lo más) semántico (posible) XHTML.

Aunque no hay un nivel de accesibilidad exigido, la tendremos bastante en cuenta en el desarrollo de las plantillas y, si no se deteriora mucho el código cuando realicen la integración con el gestor del portal, con suerte podremos ver parte de un portal generalista en España maquetado con estándares y teniendo en cuenta la accesibilidad :)

Ya iremos contando que tal sale todo.

Llevamos un tiempo queriendo investigar a fondo cómo afrontar el desarrollo web para dispositivos móviles. Es un tema que nos apasiona, pero es muy reciente y, por desgracia, hay poca información y las buenas ideas aún no están estandarizadas.

El panorama actual en cuanto a lenguajes, navegadores y dispositivos es realmente aterrador. Hoy en día es complicado hacer una página que funcione sin problemas en un abanico amplio de dispositivos móviles (como PDAs o teléfonos móviles).

Para poder investigar en este tema, hemos creado un blog y un pequeño laboratorio de desarrollo y usabilidad web para dispositivos móviles. En ring iremos escribiendo sobre las pruebas que realicemos y las conclusiones a las que podamos llegar.

Hace unas semanas los chicos de Neurotic (con los que llevámamos tiempo con ganas de trabajar) nos encargaron el rediseño de la web de Control Ever, una empresa dedicada a la venta de carretillas elevadoras.

El encargo era rediseñar el menú, el buscador, las tablas, y la ficha de cada producto. Pero al final decidimos incluir también la cabecera y así darle un cambio de aspecto general a la página.

Así que nosotros les mandamos los PSD y ellos están ahora con la maquetación con XHTML y CSS. Avisaremos cuando esté lista!

La portada:

La tabla de productos - nótese el curro de vectorizar la carretilla ;) :

La ficha de un productos:

Y el formulario de login: