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Realtime has now been implemented and under going testing on the dashboard.

We’re packing our bags and moving, join us!

Zood has been in the development stage for just over 6 months now and what a long way it has come! There are several things we’ve had to overcome as a new startup and we’d like to talk to you about one of them today.

As of now, Zood will be known as Klydo. To make the transition easier, the Zood domain will temporarily redirect to Klydo. The move is necessary to continue development and get the closed BETA out to our already eagerly awaiting users. We’ll publish a blog post within the next few days outlining the details of this move including thoughts from the Klydo founding team.

The change doesn’t affect you apart from needing to remember to visit klydo.com instead of zood.com. We’ll be doing our best to get everything switched over and on the road to our closed BETA release within the coming months. In addition to all that excitement, we have made a commitment to keep you in the loop with more frequent interaction via Facebook and Twitter as well as a regularly updated blog.

We hope you are as excited as we are to take part in the Klydo experience throughout 2010.

Yours Truly,

Klydo Team

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LinkedIn recently announced an updated interface design which seems to resemble the primary navigation header of Zood. Just to clarify – we’re not saying they stole nor have even seen Zood. We simply find it interesting to see that so many large organizations are beginning to ‘clean up’ the user interface to bring a better experience to everyone. We hope you enjoyed this sneak peak!

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At Zood, we enjoy ourselves with late night Skype meetings that can sometimes last hours. After all, world domination is what we do - sleep isn’t an option.

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A preview of our “possible” new landing page, hopefully to brighten it up a bit more!

Zood Development Blog #1

Hello, its Simon here (the Co-Founder and Lead Developer of Zood.com)! I’ve always wanted to do one of these sorts of blogs since I became the Lead Developer in my previous job and now that we’re developing Zood I finally get the chance to write one, woohoo!

So yes, welcome to the first official Zood development blog :). In this blog I’ll discuss what’s been happening in regards to the development of the main Zood site, what’s happening on the business side of things (as long as it doesn’t get too confidential of course!) and basically anything else that may be of your interest! So without further ado, let’s get started!

Development of the site officially began in July 2009 but it must be said that since then we have actually been working on and off the site as we have had to spend a lot of time on the business side of things as we are only a 3 man team at the moment (one PHP wiz, one design guru and one biz genius). For those of you wanting to know about the actual mechanics behind the site; we’re currently developing the site on a single server (provided by Rapidswitch LTD). We use PHP as the main scripting language behind the site and MySQL as the main format for data storage. We also use Amazon Web Services, such as S3 for “cloud” file storage and EC2 for virtual server instances to help balance load.

Now, to get on to some matters that you should be interested in, I’m going to answer a few of the main questions that I’m getting asked at the moment. So, here we go…

The first question that I’m getting asked at the moment is whether Zood will have a public API or not. While a lot of people that have asked me this think it is a simple yes or no answer, it is actually a major decision. The fact of whether we have a public API or not will actually decide how open (if at all) we are when it comes to website integration. Whilst we personally have amazing respect for sites (especially Twitter) that allow external websites to plug in to their content and user base it may not be the right direction for Zood. A private API can be a great avenue when it comes to generating revenue which is sadly an important thing to consider when you’re a young business that needs revenue to stay afloat. Whilst we are not ruling out making the API private we are hoping to offer some ways to retrieve and submit data (for free) via some sort of Zood API which we hope will meet developer’s expectations.

The second question is if we are looking for extra developers to help out build the Zood website. Whilst we appreciate all offers of volunteer work when it comes to coding/programming, I’m afraid we are not currently looking for extra developers (though we are looking for a graphic designer [not website designer] so please get in touch if you are one!). We are planning on taking on a few extra developers once the first Zood beta is released to help out with the individual parts of the site (such as videos, blogs, photos, etc) to ensure each section on Zood is as good as it can be but at the moment development is progressing as fast as it’s needs to be so we’re doing O.K :).

The next question that I’m getting asked is a rather funny one for me personally but isn’t really development related I’m afraid. The question is “Are you a real business or are you just some kids running a site from their bedroom?”. Well the answer to this is both yes and no. Whilst GNRation (the business behind Zood) is a real company that is currently in the process of being registered in the UK, we do actually run the business from our own home (which is actually pretty awesome!). This is simply because Greg and I (Co-Founders of Zood) have lived in the same house since the start of 2009 and so there has been no need for us to buy/rent a separate office. It keeps costs low and also means we can wake each other up if we ever have any awesome ideas for Zood!

The final question that I’ll answer for now (to stop boring you) is “when will Zood be released?”. Well, whilst there is no exact date for when we’re planning on releasing Zood, we’re hoping to get a private BETA online by the end of September for selected BETA testers and those lovely press folk.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask them in the comments or get in touch with me either via my Twitter (@parallelworlds) or email me at: simon@gnration.com. I hope to get another blog out in the next few days to explain the development of Zood in a bit more detail as well as lots of cool other stuff!

Bye for now!