Zootool supports tons of video sites to make your Zoo the perfect place for your favourite videos. Today I am glad to finally introduce Myspace video support!! Sometimes things on the web are jinxed - there’s a super easy way to find out about the thumbnail url of Myspace videos but I needed more than four months to find it. Of course I didn’t really spend all my time with this shit, but I had about three or four afternoons during this time digging through google and the myspace developer site without success. Looking back I must have been blind but that’s the way it is sometimes.

Just a short hint: http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/rss.ashx?type=video&videoID=xxxxx

Another thing is embedded videos. The lasso has always been able to find embedded videos on websites, but it was pretty lame in recognizing them. The only way to save them in your Zoo was to directly open the embedded videos in Youtube, Vimeo or whatever and click the lasso once again. That’s over now for most of the supported video sites. If you discover a video from Youtube, Vimeo, Myspace, Blip.tv, Viddler and most of the rest on a blog or webpage you will be able to select it with the lasso and save it with all the thumbnail and embed stuff now. The rest will follow as soon as possible.

Some weeks ago I’ve applied for the Karl-Steinbuch-Scholarship for Zootool. This scholarship “supports creative and innovative it- and media-projects from all branches of study”. I neither really expected to be invited to the jury interview nor to get the scholarship, but amazingly they seemed to like Zootool and so I got it! This is absolutely fantastic because the next year I can really concentrate on Zootool now. The scholarship is dedicated to the further development of the project and I had to give them a roadmap on how things will go on, so there are a lot of things planned for the Zookunft (means future - sorry, for this absolutely dumb german wordwitz). Be prepared

There are so many cool things you can do with Zootool and nobody really knows about them. They are buried deep down in the archives of this blog and as soon as they don’t show up on the first blogpage anymore they are forgotten forever. So here is our feature recall offensive – the Zoo-Info box:

Randomly on every page reload new sticky little pieces of information will show up in the sidebar of the homepage and introduce you to interesting new, old or super old features. You might already know some of them, but you surely will be surprised by a few things you didn’t know yet. For all pro users there’s the “hide this” button. Just hit it and you won’t get bothered by this box ever again. Once it is hidden you can reactivate it in your settings.

Are you tired of uploading your avatar on every new social web thing over and over again? I am, and it seems that most Zootool users are too. Only a few are uploading their pictures in Zootool which makes the list of featured Zootool users on the homepage pretty ridiculous looking, and finding new contacts is somehow difficult with the default avatar everywhere around.

A few weeks ago, when I saw the “import friends” feature on pownce, I thought that it would be awesome to have something similar for avatars. Gravatar is a great approach to global avatars you can take everywhere with you, but the system is pretty much limited to blogs and I haven’t seen very much social platforms using this. The great thing is that almost every major community is hosting a simple API to provide information about their users’ profiles. So I had a closer look at the API documentation of Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, Youtube and Vimeo and in all cases it was super simple to get the url of the avatar by username. Facebook and MySpace offer much more complicated APIs, so I skipped them temporarily. All you’ve got to do now, when you already own an account on one of these platforms, is to insert your username, hit the import button and see the magic happen! To import your picture simply click on your current avatar or go to the board > your picture

The lasso can be used to share your stuff on Twitter or Delicious, but you can also use it to share it via email. This feature isn’t new, but today I am introducing the improved version of it.

Until today it was possible to add up to 10 email adresses. Now you just can type in the nicknames of your contacts. An autocomplete function will help you to type them in even faster and so you will never have to worry about the correct spelling of a specific address - Zootool will do the job for you. Of course you can still add some email adresses if you like to share stuff with people without a Zoo.

At the moment I have to kill some time on the web2expo in Berlin, because my pass does not include workshops and I don’t want to hang around in sponsored sessions anymore, where they are trying to sell you some useless crap though you have paid a lot of money for all this. So I hacked together a Zoobutton you can include in your Website or Blog, thus making it easy for your visitors to save your site inside their Zoos.

 Add this to Zootool

<a href="http://zootool.com" onclick="window.open('http://zootool.com/add/?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title), 'zootool','toolbar=no,width=650,height=500'); return false;"><img src="http://zootool.com/images/zootool.small.gif" height="16" width="16" alt="Zootool" />Add this to Zootool</a>

Registered users can find this HTML-code at Board > Zoobutton.

I’ve polished the Lasso window a bit the last days. I am preparing some new cool features and for them I need a better way to handle space in the Lasso window. So today I am introducing tabs for all sharing functions. Once you’ve hit the Twitter button for example a Twitter tab pops up and you will be able to insert your new tweet very easily without the confusing stuff around it. (btw, I’ve also added some fancy little icons you can add to your tweet). I think this makes the whole interface a lot cleaner and in my opinion it just looks cool.

Next big thing is the Web Expo in Berlin next week. Habu and I will be there and hope to see some of you guys!! Habu is already in Berlin attending the Barcamp this weekend and all the other crazy web stuff. I would love to be there too, but I can’t. I’m excited about the upcoming events and I hope that we’ll have some opportunities there to tell people about Zootool.

What’s the sense in a service where you can upload videos with just 12 seconds? There’s no limitation on Youtube, Vimeo or whatever, so why just don’t use these instead? These are the first questions most average users might ask themselves when they first visit 12seconds.tv. If you know Twitter the answer might be simple for you. It’s this kind of magic which lies in the short, condensed portion of information. 140 characters or 12 seconds it’s somehow the same thing with two different kinds of media. Faster then ever before people can show or tell the rest of the world what they are doing and this is just awesome! 12seconds.tv is still in a private beta, but I wanted Zootool to support this. I love their simple style and their API rocks. So go ahead and catch your favorite 12 seconds!

Fluid is a great tool from Todd Ditchendorf, making it possible to create a stand-alone desktop app on your mac out of any website or webapp. It has some great features to even enhance your webapps, but you should really visit the Fluid site to get to know more about it.

Today I’ve dug a bit deeper into its possibilities and created a cool desktop version of Zootool’s Aquarium. This is really helpful because it brings all your collected stuff right into your mac menu bar. Let me show you how:

First of all you should download Fluid: http://fluidapp.com/
Next you should download the Zootool Fluid icon (we’ll need that later)

Open Fluid…

… and type in the stuff above. Be sure to enter the correct link to the Fluid version of the Aquarium. Also make sure to select the previously downloaded icon on your hard drive.

Click on “Launch Now” to open your newly created Aquarium app!

The created app isn’t quite how it should be, so we have to tweak it a bit.

First of all open the Aquarium perferences (click on the Apple icon > select “Preferences”) In “General Preferences” just put in the stuff from above. I’ve chosen Ctrl-Cmd-Space as Global Shortcut, but you can of course choose something different.

Afterwards go to the “Tabs Preferences” and deselect “Enable tabbed browsing” and select “Select tabs and windows as they are created”. This will make sure that all of your links in the Aquarium will open in a new Safari window and not in the Aquarium itself.

We are pretty close now. All you’ve got to do next is to convert the app to a “MenuExtra SSB”. This means that your app will show up in your menu bar and not in your dock.

Boom, it’s up there in your menu bar, but it does look messy because of the small window. Just drag the left bottom corner to adjust the window size.

When you’ve done that one last tweak is to hide the status bar at the bottom with cmd-shift-7 and that’s it.

Now you’re Aquarium is there whenever you’ll need it - even if your default browser is closed! You can open it at any time with the Global Shortcut you’ve entered earlier, start to type and search your Zoo immediately. You can even browse the results with arrow-up and arrow-down and open selected links with enter!

If you want your new Aquarium to open at startup, go to the “System Preferences” > “Accounts” > “Login Items” and add the Aquarium to your “Login Items” with the plus icon.

I never knew exactly how easy it would be for Zootool newbies to understand all that stuff about the Lasso, how to save new content in Zootool and how to use the Zoo interface. We offered some kind of instruction on how to procede after the sign-up, but it was never done well. Habu and I were talking about this for quite some time and we both felt that we are loosing users there, because they just don’t get it. It took longer than I expected to offer a solution I really feel comfortable with, because I also never thought that it would be that hard to write and design a good documentation!!

From today on new users will be led to the “first steps” page after the sign-up. We tried to break it down into three easy steps, helping you to start right away. In the same time we wanted to design something that really convinces people to go on. One of the bad side effects of the web 2 point - i can’t hear it anymore - 0 bubble is that people don’t waste their time anymore exploring new sites longer than necessary, because it’s just no fun to click through the 72nd community/aggregator/socialwtf. I don’t know if we did a good job on that but at least the page looks good

Even old, wise and experienced Zootool users should have a look at: http://zootool.com/first_steps