ziizoo blog

Search is working again. Yahoo!

If you are wondering why searching for a tutor on ziizoo.com does not work, you can thank the friendly people at The Planet. Apparently they decided to unplug our search appliance and leave it in their warehouse until Monday.

Your appliance has been sent to our warehouse for shipping, and will be shipped on Monday. At this time we do not have an ETA for the arrival however.

Kyle Spitz
Supervisor, Data Center Operations

In the meantime, ziizoo.com will still work as usual, but you just can’t search. So ping us at customersupport@ziizoo.com if you need help finding a tutor. Otherwise you can ping some of the top tutors on the site directly:

Daniel Fourie
Phil Vogel
Brent Sonnek Schmelz
Dalmo Mendonca
Anna Estat
Jennifer Taylor
Mark Wang
Cathy Wu

Tutors, now you can place your Facebook badge on your ziizoo profile page. Doing so gives students an easy, convenient way to validate your academic credentials. Tutors that add a Facebook badge to their profile will also see the Facebook “FB” icon next to their names in search results.

To add a Facebook badge, CLICK HERE and simply click the “Create Badge” button.

Facebook will then output a few lines of code that you can copy and paste into the appropriate field in your profile tab (click here to go to your profile tab).

Is anyone reading this old enough to remember New Coke? If not, here is a little primer to get you up to speed. In a nutshell it was a marketing disaster. The popular theory was that Coke consistently lost the “Pepsi challenge” because Pepsi was sweeter. So people inside Coke responded accordingly and created New Coke. Mind you, customers were not clamoring for New Coke or anything else new. But Coke executives responded to a perceived threat and changed the formula anyway. The rest is history. I remember drinking a can and thinking it tasted like crap (there is no other word I can use to describe it). Many view it as one of the worst product launches ever (though Microsoft Vista is quickly catching up).

Does anyone have the feeling that Facebook just did the same thing with their new interface?

My affection for Facebook is still strong as a user (although that is being tested–more on that later), but my affection for it as an advertiser died a long time ago. In the early days the advertising platform was horrible. Then in the spring they tuned it so you could at least target certain age demographics (among other things). But it still did not change the fact that despite knowing who you are, Facebook does not know what you want. Put another way, Google doesn’t know who you are (though that is changing), but they definitely know what you want. Why? Because you tell them every time you do a search! As long as I am competing against Coca-Cola and every other mega-corporation for the same impressions, advertising on Facebook will always be a losing proposition. So when the marketing budget tightened, Facebook was the first to go.

We are proud to have finally vanquished this annoying bug. The ziizoo session tool is officially compatible with the most recent release of Flash Player 9 – version 124. This means no more “waiting to connect” messages when you launch the session tool. With this logjam cleared, we will start to roll out enhancements of the session tool that we think will greatly improve the tutoring experience.

Due to a snafu involving UPS and our new host, the Google Mini Search Appliance will not be online until tomorrow morning at the earliest. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. We will be working frantically to bring the Mini back online as soon as it arrives at our host tomorrow morning.

We are in the process of moving our Google Mini Search Appliance to a new and happier home. This is the final stage of our drawn-out, double-migration. The site will be down for the next 24 hours. If you have any questions please contact us at customersupport@ziizoo.com.

ziizoo.com will be down from early Saturday morning, August 16th, until mid-afternoon, Sunday August 17th. We are taking the site down to migrate (again!) to more powerful servers, release the long anticipated fix to the “waiting to connect” error and deploy a grab bag of overdue tweaks and tunes. Thank you for your patience as we work to make ziizoo even better. If you have any questions, comments or immediate concerns, please contact us at customersupport@ziizoo.com.

If you are bored at your summer internship then kill some time playing Little Farm by MumboJumbo on Facebook. MumboJumbo is a leading developer and publisher of casual games and, in the spirit of full disclosure, an investor in ziizoo. So kill some time, have some fun, and help us keep the lights on by checking out MumboJumbo’s games on Facebook or its website, www.mumbojumbo.com (register today to get a free game!).