Zoji
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- For the mountain pass in India, see Zoji Pass
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| URL | http://www.zoji.com/ |
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| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Event invitations |
| Registration | Free |
| Owner | Dan Shen |
| Created by | Dan Shen and Kevin Tao |
| Launched | 2007, to-be-announced |
| Current status | Pre-marketing launch |
Zoji is a website that lets users easily create event invitations, share pictures, and keep an online scrapbook. These features are integrated with restaurant and bar/club reviews to provide useful tools for the city-dweller. In addition, it provides the usual backbone social networking features such as blogs, groups, photos, instant messaging, and music. Zoji differentiates itself by its non-corporate nature and committment to users.
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[edit] Site Features
During its initial development period, Zoji developed feature parity with some of its larger rivals. Generally, the developers worked to bring together the best features of its corporate rivals like MySpace and Facebook. These features included picture and music sharing, blogs, email, and of course Zoji's focus: event planning.
After this initial development period, Zoji expanded its features and began offering features not yet offered on other social networking sites. A completely web-based instant messaging client. An ajax-enabled calendar allows easy navigation of past and future events, and also can be synced with virtually any external calendaring application. RSS feeds allow power users to be notified of new content without the need to browse the site. Zoji also defaults to preferentially showing users and content near your location, such that users are delivered with the most relevant content for their area.
Zoji's newest features allow users to post reviews on restaurants, bars and clubs, or to add a new restaurants, bar or clubs if it is not already in their vast database. Friends can view and comment of the reviews and see the users favorite restaurants on their profile page. In this manner, friends can discover that they each share a favorite restaurant or a bar preference.
Finally, Zoji entices new users by providing unlimited picture hosting and email, and by keeping its pages nearly ad-free.
[edit] History
[edit] Timeline
- 2004 - October: Zoji.com launches public beta, primarily as a testing ground for the database and webserver backends.
- 2006 - February: Zoji launches skinable CSS-enabled pages for profiles, blogs, groups and events.
- 2006 - October: Zoji surpasses 200,000 pageviews in one month.
[edit] Praises
The organization and interface of Zoji, including RSS-feeds and more easily readable profile skins that do not default to immediately playing music upon loading, have earned it much positive praise among its demographic of users (generally in their mid-20 to 30s). Zoji's vast array of features also keep its fan-base dedicated. Users tend to feel a strong bond with other members of the Zoji community, something that has also likely arisen because of the developers quick and public responses to feedback on the site and involved activity on the site.
[edit] Criticism
Criticisms of Zoji often focus on its small size. Non-zoji members may feel the community is too small or that their friends are not on the site. Some power-users feel that the small startup cannot keep up with its behemoth competitors with larger budgets. But perhaps the most prevalent criticism is simply that there are already enough social networking websites.
