ProjectX Blog

We’ve launched a new feature on ZoomIn today – Directions! Thanks to the awesome power of the Google API, you can now show you how to get from A to B on ZoomIn.



You can get directions from any address or place in ZoomIn or simply click on the “Get Directions” link at the top of the page. Its really easy ! Find your way to Te Papa, or Sky City Tower.

Enjoy!

ZoomIn is 3 years today ! October 29th in 2005, ZoomIn was launched to the world. Currently we have 78734 places and 11558 users on ZoomIn ! Thanks to everyone who has contributed to ZoomIn.

ZoomIn has come a long way since that date, here’s a look at some the changes that have happened over the last 3 years.

We’ve completely overhauled the add place process on ZoomIn. Now, if you want to add a place to ZoomIn is as simple as 1, 2, 3.

1. Drag the Add place marker onto the map

Position the marker with X marks the spot. You can adjust the position by dragging the marker to the correct location.

2. Refine your address using the drop down box

We automagically figure out the closest address based on your location. All you have to do is refine the address in the dropdown menu to match your desired location.

3. Add your place content

You can add the name of the place / business, a description and tags .

And you’re done!

We’ve just completed an update to the underlying data on ZoomIn. We’ve just switched to a new suburb set on ZoomIn base onto the “New Zealand Fire Service” (NZFS) suburb set.

Why?

Its about accuracy, we want to provide the most up to date map service around. The NZFS suburb set is being used by all of New Zealand emergency services ie. Police, Ambulance and Fire Service. This update will better represent the way that you think and use addresses in your neighbourhood. The update adds another 1500 suburbs to ZoomIn. We’ve now got a total of 2986 suburbs in our address database.

We’ve completely rebuilt our address system from scratch, which gives us a chance to get all of the address cobwebs out of the system.

Changes to ZoomIn urls

The new address data means changes to the ZoomIn URL’s. Don’t worry, all of the old URL’s will still work, they’ll automatically redirect to the new address url.

Here are some examples:

OLD: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/wellington/wellington+wharf/waterloo+quay/28/
NEW: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/wellington/pipitea/waterloo+quay/28/

OLD: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/auckland/auckland/queen+street/
NEW: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/map/nz/auckland/auckland+central/queen+street/

ZoomIn will be down from 6pm today (7th July 2008). We will be performing several data maintenance tasks, including updated addresses and suburbs. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

The site should be back up within the night, after the tasks have been completed.

We’ve recently added bigger pictures to search results page when viewing a single place. Now you can see the pictures that have been added to ZoomIn. We’ve got over 5700 photos of different places.

Remember adding photos to your business or favourite place is good way of getting noticed.

We’re lifting the lid on some functionality that we’ve been working for a while to make it easier to browse content on ZoomIn. For the first release (currently in “Garage Mode”) we’re focusing on browsing photos. So now you can look at all of the photos around any location, as you zoom and pan around the photos will constantly update.

To get the browse photos explorer either click on  explore photos on the home page or search for any address or place and expand the results box to reveal the Explore photos link.

We have two modes of browsing Photo bar and Thumbnails.

Photo Bar style

Browse the photos via the photo bar.

Thumbnail style

View all of the photos on the map.

Explore Photos is in Garage mode, which means we’ll be tinkering and improving over the next few weeks.

We appreciate your suggestions and feedback, so let us know what you think.

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

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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:

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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.

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