We’ve been working hard over the past fews months fixing bugs and making improvements to ZoomIn.

Here’s a summary of what we’ve been working on:

New Functionality

• Activity Feed - Here you can see the last 20 actions by our members on ZoomIn.
• Popular places - This is where you can see the 10 most popular places, today, this week and of all time.
• GeoRSS - We’ve added GeoRSS feeds for the latest places, photos and comments . (For an example of what the GeoRSS feed looks like, have a look at this example on Google.)
• Nearby places - On the information page, you can find out what’s nearby your favourite places eg. Here’s whats nearby popular 3c bar.

Usability Improvements

We been make lots of improvements to the functionality on ZoomIn.

• We improved our default URL system so that now you can directly link to a map of an address or place or link to information about that address or place. eg. Map of Arrowtown and Information on Arrowtown.
• Search - We’ve made improvements to the search, so that it’s more accurate.
• Design - From your feedback, we’ve redesigned the map results page to fix a number of layout bugs and remove whitespace thus maximising the map. We’ve also added a new navigation slider to the map.
• Photos - We added bigger thumbnails on the information pages and user profile pages. We’ve also allowed users to change the default picture for a place.
• Enabled custom IFrame sizes for users who are embed maps on their web page or blogs.

And a whole raft of bug fixes. We’ve got a more new functionality and improvements in the wings that will be released soon.

From today on, ZoomIn allows users to choose a default photo for their places. If you are the owner of a place , you have the power to let other users choose a default photo for your place.

Go and do it now, pick the most beautiful photos for your places!

Yesterday, we released the improved feature of sharing ZoomIn maps, which allows users to embed maps on their websites, also enable users to customize the width and height of the iframe.

Here is an example, I’m using ZoomIn map to show the location of ProjectX

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Recently, we’re looking at Google Analytics and we found that the bounce rate for one of our important pages had crept up to 50%.
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from that page) - the stat helps to determine the quality of the page.

Initially, we were a little perplexed and even arrogant when we were trying to figure out why people were exiting immediately. We started asking ourselves some questions…

• Whats wrong with page?
• Why aren’t the user getting it?
• Does the page match what the users expected to see?
• What information do the users expect to see?

Then we started to look at which pages the users were coming from, then it became clear that we’d mucked up the task flow of this particular action. We made some changes to the our task flow and the result were immediate and dramatic.

We had a 5 times improvement across those pages on the site it dropped from over 50% to 9% . And we’ve noticed 100% improvement in time on site as a result.

I can recommend that some analysis of your key metrics, can help you analyse whats working and whats not working on your site.

This morning, we migrated ZoomIn from rails 1.2.3 to rails 2.02 . The process was relatively painless. Its running about 10-15% faster than previously rails from the initial testing and it fixed the mysterious comma bug that affected rails routing.

Here’s the guide that we used to migrate - http://www.slashdotdash.net/articles/2007/12/03/rails-2-upgrade-notes

We had a couple other things that we found. First, when upgrading to capistrano 2, you will need to make sure that you use the right namespaces for steps that you have customised for the build recipe. Also, be wary of upgrading to RMagick 2, it requires a newer version of Imagemagick beyond what is default package for debian and ubuntu and RMagick has some compile problems as a result. We reverted to older version of RMagick to solve.

We’re in the process on migrating the rest of ProjectX applications over the next couple of days.

We’ve shifted the ZoomIn website from our hosting provider in the US to NZ.

In the lead up to Xmas, we had a number of issues with our hosting provider in the US, and we made the decision to move the site back to NZ. The site has been up since the weekend, and is noticeably faster

We like to think that our technology is being used solely for good rather than evil, but there are some applications where it’s hard to tell. Stalking would be a no-no, but celebrity stalking doesn’t seem so bad. That’s the purpose of the Wellingtonista Celeb Vista group on ZoomIn, which is fully explained in this post on the Wellingtonista.

Simply put, it’s a group for tracking celebrity sightings, but Wellington being Wellington, the celebs being stalked are somewhat more highbrow than on other celebrity-stalking mashups, hence the inclusion of Peter McLeavey along with Bret McKenzie and Shortland Streeters. At least there are no politicians … yet.