Zukmo Release Update

We are happy to share that we have let loose another upgraded version in production over the weekend. Most of the work behind this release has been focused on tweaking stuff “under the hood” with predominantly back end improvements, specifically to the schema of the database and indexing engine but we have also noticeable modifications to share in two distinct areas.

Search:
Search feature is a key cornerstone supporting our services and it will always be an important focal point for continual optimization. We hope to have progressed on this front by a few leaps with this release by providing a crisper and faster search experience for the users than before. In addition, other schema modifications have been incorporated that will serve as a launch pad for the broader expansion of our services. This aspect will become more visible in the future as we turn towards utilizing this foundational platform to support content from other sources.

Tagging:
Users will also be confronted with a more fundamental modification to one of our earlier features. We are basically moving away from Categorization and have effectively changed our schema and services to fully support Tagging and so users can henceforth add/edit/delete their own tags.

This is due to the following factors that were taken into account for a better user experience:

• Provide ample control to the users in terms of how they want to classify content
• Discard the imperfections resulting from the crystal ball algorithms of auto categorization.
• Provide maximum range and flexibility to user’s choices without imposing a small set of predetermined categories

This move also falls in line with how the revolution of social computing has permeated the footprint of tags throughout the digital universe and we will henceforth be able to support the importing of tags from other bookmarking sites into Zukmo. In fact, we can even provide for suggestive mechanisms for classification based on prior tagging behavior and meta tags available within pages meant to be added to your Personal Digital Library. We feel that going in this direction will be more useful to all our users and we already got a fair bit of feature requests from some users urging for this change of philosophy to support their need to tag content effectively.

Certainly, categories are great for a structured browsing experience provided they are a small, well defined and yet widely embracing list. However, while categories do have their advantages in specific contexts, we feel a frozen and compact list of categories will not do justice to the vastness and variety of content we expect to be included in Zukmo. We felt it prudent to therefore allow the elbow room to the users to add whatever combination of tags would help define and identify their content better. We can in turn choose to list the most popular ones and help users leverage tag search to be able to find the content. The UI too has been changed on all counts to support tagging and we will continue to refine the experience by providing for a robust recommendation engine to tag content suitably and tailoring the UI to stylize the tags better and display list of popular tags.

Miscellaneous:
Besides tagging, we have made considerable UI changes to the “Add to Zukmo and Share” functionality from the Browser button and enabled it to be more user friendly with users being able to pick from a list of names that were previously used for sharing. We have also made minor modifications to the site map and site pages and specifically created a single point of reference to all support related material such as How to Videos, FAQ, Email/Technical support and Feedback. There is also a download page for users to grab the browser button for all supported browsers

There is yet another interesting boost to the versatility of Zukmo but that will be mentioned in a separate post which is to follow this one.

Please be assured that we will continue to ramp up our workload and ensure that a richer and more substantive set of features are bundled into Zukmo to make it a highly worthwhile destination of all your content.