In our efforts to create a more connected phonebook, we are now releasing an easy way for our users to share their location on the website. The location can be set on all pages and we use Google's map API to retrieve the specific geo location.

In addition to letting the user enter the location manually, we are taking advantage of the W3C Geolocation API. This API lets the browser specify the location automatically if it can retrieve it using GPS or Wi-Fi signals. The feature will be built into Firefox 3.1, but for now you can use an add-on called Geode. It looks like this:

When you log into zyb.com you are asked to give your location by Geode. You can then specify the accuracy in which you want to give it. If you aren't comfortable with sharing your exact location, you can just specify the city or country. This is a great and easy way to share your location with your friends and family. The feature will be live in a few days, so go download Geode.

Today's release introduced a lot of new features - both visible and invisible ones. Among the invisible ones are support for more phone brands and types, faster synchronization and automatic Flickr account discoverability for contacts. They are significant improvements and deserve a post each, but this time I'll tell you about the new visible features instead.

OpenID

It is now possible to sign in and sign up using OpenID. All existing users can also login using their OpenID and then associate the OpenID with the existing account.  That means you don't lose any contacts or events because everything stays the same, except you can now use OpenID to authenticate yourself.

FriendPlayer

During the last months, our product and design team has been experimenting with different ways of showing what your contacts have been up to. First came the Friendstream, which was a graphical representation of the usual date sorted list of status updates and events. Now, they came up with a Friendplayer, which is very unique and give you a brilliant way of getting the latest updates from your contacts. It looks a bit like a cross between the Friendstream and a video player.

Public API

On zyb.com/feeds you can see a list of all  the different kind of information and formats you need to create mash-ups or third-party integrations. Currently we support 6 different formats and you can retrieve contacts, calendar events, SMS'es and activities on the Life- and FriendPlayer. The formats are RSS, JSON, FOAF, SIOC, VCard and VCalendar.

The information is protected by a special key that only the account owner knows, but is free to distribute. The key can be changed easily, which will render all the old URLs useless.

Hyves social network

We've added support for the Hyves social network, primarily used in the Netherlands. This means that Hypes users can now import thumbnail pictures and other information from their friends on Hyves, and merge them with the contacts on the phone.  Most Sony Ericsson devices support contact thumbnail synchronization, so you get a nice picture displayed on the phone when a friend calls.

Performance improvements

Using YSlow and Fiddler to monitor the network traffic, we have made huge improvements in the website performance. By using the right cache strategies we were able to reduce the amount of data a user needed to download significantly. Also, zyb.com relies heavily on the use of JavaScript and we have worked very hard on optimizing the code for better performance. Performance optimization is still very high on our to-do list the next 1½ month, so expect to see the site getting faster and faster during that period.

Finally, I just want to wish you happy ZYBbing and I hope you will enjoy the new features as much as we did implementing them.

The ZYB team is in the process of implementing OpenID right now. It’s working on our development servers and we can both sign in and sign up using OpenID. It will be released very soon. If you don't know what OpenID is, take a look at this short video.

We are doing this for three reasons:

Reason 1. The community

For some time now, the ZYB community has been asking for OpenID login support. Since most of the developers at ZYB use OpenID, we totally understand why you want this on zyb.com. Keep on asking us to implement cool features. The more requests we receive, the higher priority they get on our roadmap. Feature requests can be posted here in the comments.

Reason 2. Data portability

The second reason for implementing OpenID is that it correlates with our efforts in supporting data portability. It’s your data we’re storing, so you should be able to take it with you wherever you go on the web. It’s the same with OpenID. It’s your credentials, so you should be able to use them anywhere.

Reason 3. It's the future

We are very sure that OpenID will be the standard way of authentication on the web in the future. By implementing OpenID we also help speed up the adoption rate and thereby brings the future a little bit closer.

The user experience

When you visit zyb.com and have to sign in, you can either choose to use your existing username/password or sign in using OpenID. The first time you're using OpenID we will ask you whether or not you wish to create a new ZYB account or to assign your OpenID to an existing account. If you wish to do that, then you have to enter your username/password once. Now you are able to use your OpenID to login to your existing account.

If you wish to create a ZYB account you can easily do that without entering your name or e-mail address like you normally would. We retrieve that info automatically from your OpenID provider. This makes it really fast to create a new account and you will be flying in a matter of seconds.

Today’s zyb.com release introduced, among a lot of things, the semantic formats FOAF and SIOC for all profile pages. Actually, FOAF has been supported for a few weeks now, whereas SIOC is just released today.

FOAF is an XML standard for describing contact information much like the vCard format used by your phone, Outlook and others. SIOC describes actions performed by ZYB users such as Shouting, writing comments or updating status messages on Facebook. Together FOAF and SIOC provide a powerful API for gathering information by third-parties.

For a couple of months now, you have also been able to import contacts from FOAF. It could be a FOAF document somewhere on the web or on your own hard drive.

Why is it important?

At ZYB we strongly believe that the data we hold for our users do not belong to us. It is solely the property of the individual users. In that regard, we want to take every step necessary to ensure the user can do with the data what she wants. That includes data portability and that’s what FOAF and SIOC is all about. Some people call it Web 3.0 – we call it respect for our users.

It is a goal that we both create and consume various semantic formats - first of all because it is of great personal interest by the ZYB developers, but also because it can help us to provide a much greater experience for the users.

What about privacy?

Since ZYB holds very sensitive information for all our users, we take privacy very seriously. That’s why the FOAF document renderers differently depending on who requests it. If you request your own FOAF document, you get all the information that we can possibly give you. Anyone else will only get the bare minimum, but enough to make sense for them together with SIOC.

You’ll find the two formats at zyb.com/profilename.foaf and zyb.com/profilename.sioc respectively.

In the following weeks, we’ll write more about how data portability and the semantic web play a big part of our development efforts.

Hello, and welcome to the new ZYB blog. This is where the developers behind zyb.com will let you in on a lot of secrets, hidden features and future directions. It is also the place where you can tell the ZYB developers what you would like from future releases.

Our mission is clear: Share information about zyb.com with everyone interested. The subjects we will address here will be of a technical nature and could be about almost anything related to the zyb.com website.

The reason is that a lot of the features we develop are hidden by nature. It could be the RSS feeds or FOAF files that you already have access to, but might never notice. That’s why we feel the need to share with you all of these little secrets and hopefully you will give us feedback on them so we can improve them continuously.

If you are a ZYB user and technical minded this is exactly what you have been looking for, hurry up and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Sincerely yours,

The ZYB developer team