Zoopcast Blog

Well, Zoopcast has done its dash. Due to a variety of factors, I have decided to finally close Zoopcast down.

While I still believe there is a need for an easy way for people to find out information about what’s going on near them, for a crowd-sourced service like Zoopcast to be truly useful, there needs to be a lot of people in a particular area using it. And for people to want to use it, it needs to be useful. It’s a chicken and egg problem.

The local Q&A market was quite busy in 2010/11. Zoopcast was not alone in what it was trying to do. Hopefully one of the players will make it big, but it will be tough. Twitter is also in a good position to add more location features that could go some of the way to becoming a location-aware messaging service.

The app has been out of the App Store for a while now, but for all you old-time users of Zoopcast, it has been fun serving you, and hopefully one or two of you got some good answers to your questions.

- Arun

It’s the final of The Apprentice tonight, and last Wednesday’s episode had a record audience. The second episode of this series was about mobile apps. In that episode (part of which was filmed at TechHub, the second home of Zoopcast) Susan Ma, who is still in the running to become Lord Sugar’s business partner, tried to pitch an idea to her team.

I don’t know about you, but it sounded like she was trying to explain something that is very similar to Zoopcast. Check out her pitch on BBC iPlayer (available in the UK only).

What do you think? Does it sound like Zoopcast?

Zoopcast is the location-based Q&A service. Of course you’re you, and I’m me, but if we are close by and you have question that you think someone nearby could help you answer, you can ask it on your iPhone with Zoopcast, and I (along with other people near you) will get an alert and can answer you. It’s people-powered local search.

Try it out for free today on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, with other platforms coming soon.

And do you think Susan will win? Answer the question on Zoopcast: Do you think @susanma will win #bbcapprentice?. You can also answer from the web.

If you signed up to Zoopcast on your iPhone via your Facebook account, you can now add your Twitter and foursquare accounts at the Zoopcast web site.

Why would you want to do that? Well, soon Zoopcast will start figuring out where you are (with your permission, of course) based on your checkins and geotagged tweets. And that’s useful because you’ll start receiving more relevant questions.

So head on over to your account on Zoopcast.com. Make sure you sign in with your Facebook account first, and from there you’ll be able to connect other accounts.

If you signed up with your email address and a password, you won’t have to wait too long. You’ll be able to sign into the web site using your password in the next few days.

As always, this is new. If you have any problems, please let us know. You can either contact us directly or head over to our support community.

Here’s a quick look at how easy it’s going to be to share your questions and answers with your social networks.

Why would you want to do that? So that you can get more answers, quicker. Your friends and followers will be able to click through to your question’s page on the Zoopcast web site and answer from there. And you’ll get a push notification the regular way.

This blog has been eerily silent. I have to apologise for that. That’s going to change. Starting now!

But first, here’s what’s happened since that first post back in December.

In January, version 1.0 of Zoopcast hit the App Store. It was a very basic version, allowing you to ask and answer questions, but there were no push notifications, which is kind of useful for a real-time service. Push came about a month later, and Zoopcast started to become more useful in the regions that there were users.

There hasn’t been any publicity, short of word of mouth and startup networking events. It was more like a private beta that anybody could join. (So a public beta, then?!)

The newest release, 1.1, which came out last week, included the ability to sign up with a Twitter or foursquare account. This is to set up the service for deeper integration with social networking services.

This brings me to release early, release often. What you’re going to find is that new features will start to be added that might not quite work just yet. But you’re early adopters. You’re used to that. If there’s anything not quite working, head over to the Zoopcast Get Satisfaction support area, and I’ll get onto it. Or you can tweet @zoopcast.

So what (probably broken) functionality is being released soon? Existing users will be able to add their Facebook, Twitter and foursquare accounts to their Zoopcast accounts via the web site very shortly. That’s the bit that might not work properly, yet. The same functionality will be in the iPhone app’s next release.

You will also be able to more easily post your questions and answers to Facebook and, now, Twitter. All questions will eventually be posted on Twitter. There’ll be a whole new post when that’s available.

At the moment Zoopcast only knows where you are when you use it. In the next few weeks, if you have a Facebook or foursquare account connected to Zoopcast (and have opted in) we’ll start taking your checkins and pushing you questions near there. Look out for Google Latitude integration some time in the future.

That’s enough for now. But whenever something new is ready, you’ll hear about it here first!