A couple of days ago, ZoomIn passed the 10,000 user mark!

Looking at the stats we currently have over 52,000 places, 5200 pictures, 4000 comments and 1100 ratings.

A big thank you to all our users who have contributed to ZoomIn.

Here’s a selection of the top contributors to ZoomIn, thank you one and all!

benn 300 places, 20 photos, 113 comments

citric_labs 248 places, 0 photos, 1 comment

tagg 204 places, 5 photos, 29 comments

qwandor 176 places, 2 photos, 9 comments

tom 159 places, 135 photos, 29 comments

spangleking 35 places, 471 photos, 22 comments

jac 151 places, 465 photos, 98 comments

daniel_wang 38 places, 255 photos, 30 comments

rosslin 25 places, 163 photos, 25 comments

time2dine 23 places, 3 photos, 114 comments

dayout 115 places, 2 photos, 87 comments

nedbedrock 31 places, 50 photos, 68 comments

nik 53 places, 90 photos, 67 comments

nztr 51 places, 0 photos, 59 comments

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.

The Wellington Inner City Bypass, in all its (ahem) glory, is now properly represented on ZoomIn and Smaps. We’re working on our regular update of all the map tiles for New Zealand, but we figured that a major change to the State Highway system, that also reorganised the one-way system in an urban area, was worth getting right straight away.

We thought we’d taken much longer than we would have liked to get this done, but since changes to the one-way network on the surrounding roads kept on happening right until a couple of weeks ago, we thought it was best to get all the changes done in one go. As it turns out, it looks like we’re the first major mapping system to show the bypass: Google, Multimap, Microsoft and Yellow Maps all still have the old configuration. I can understand why it’s taking them a while: it turns out that we had to do a lot of manual editing of the streets data, and our local knowledge came in handy.

While Karo Drive is now visible on the maps, we haven’t updated our addresses database yet, so you can’t search for it. That shouldn’t be a great hardship, since at the moment there seem to be no actual addresses on Karo Drive (Martha’s Pantry is the only business there, and its address is on Cuba St), and the relocated heritage buildings there and on the adjacent Tonks Grove will remain empty for a year or more. Some would argue that Karo Drive doesn’t deserve to be listed as a “place”, since it’s a means of getting between places rather than somewhere to be, but I couldn’t possibly comment! In any case, we’ll be including Karo Drive and Tonks Grove along with all the other street changes nationwide in our next database update.

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We have just released new maps for ZoomIn. The maps show the land or cadastral boundaries of each property at last three zoom levels.

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We want to make ZoomIn better by making sure our content is up to date, appropriate for the community. We added a tool to flag any content that incorrect, objectionable or violation of copyright.

So if you see any place descriptions, photos or comments that need some attention, flag them and we’ll take care of it.

We value your feedback, any improvements or suggestions are appreciated.

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We want to make ZoomIn better by making sure our content is up to date, appropriate for the community. We added a tool to flag any content that incorrect, objectionable or violation of copyright.

So next time you find any place description, picture or comment that’s not quite right, flag it and we’ll look much sure that its fixed.

We value your feedback, any improvements or suggestions are appreciated.

We’ve release a new version of the API, the safari bugs have been resolved. Let us know if you’re having any problems.