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!
Sphere: Related ContentYesterday, 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…
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.
Sphere: Related ContentWe’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.
Sphere: Related ContentIntensCITY week, the celebration of Wellington’s urban spaces, is just about to kick off. A key part of the week is the INSite exhibition, which consists of eight shipping containers distributed around the city as artists’ spaces and installations. Here’s a ZoomIn group to show their locations (or you can go directly to the group map on ZoomIn).
As these are ZoomIn places, you can of course add your own photos and comments and edit the descriptions. I’ve kicked that process off, but if you manage to get some good photos or have some responses you want to share, please go ahead and do so.
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