Zookoda 2.0 Launches
Michael Arrington
33 comments »
Version 2.0 of Australia-based Zookoda, an email tool for bloggers, launches today. Zookoda allows bloggers to, among other things, email posts to readers on a periodic basis. It competes with Feedburner’s new email product, and while it doesn’t have the benefit of Feedburner’s massive customer base, it does offer a very robust feature set that will be attractive to many bloggers.
Founders Yorke Hinds and Nick McNaughton walked me through the new product a couple of weeks ago. Like Feedburner, the product is currently free. And while Feedburner offers only a single option for email (once a day, no ability to tweak the look and feel of the email), Zookoda offers the blogger the ability to tailor nearly every aspect of the product.
For example, Zookada offers template customization and scheduled daily and weekly and/or monthly recurring emails. Zookoda also offers very deep reporting features to see what’s being read, clicked on, etc.
If you are a blogger looking for a solution, either of Zookoda or Feedburner will work. I like Feedburner because, frankly, I don’t want to spend a lot of time formatting templates and going through detailed reports: Feedburner’s one-size-fits-all approach is perfect for TechCrunch, and I like the fact that all of my RSS and email subscription statistics are managed in one dashboard. For bloggers looking for a more robust, customizable solution, or who want more detailed reporting, Zookoda is a very user friendly product that will work extremely well.
It’s important that bloggers offer an email option for readers - some people like to receive content this way. Whether its Zookoda, Feedburner or another solution, consider offering this.
A search on quivamail.com (Zookoda’s parent company) in Google Groups returns a number of messages where the founders are - wrongfully? - labeled as “spam artists”. In fact, all results from that search on Google Groups accuse these guys from being spammers.
Now, that doesn’t mean a thing as far as I’m concerned (it’s only 35 messages, not your average number if you really are spamming the world to your hearts content) but it doesn’t look pretty.
I have been using rssfwd for this for a while. So what’s the big deal? Am I missing something - are these guys doing something new?
This will be a great tool for me. However, does it allow you to incorporate photos that are in the blog article too?
We’ve been using Zookoda for a while and have found that people definitely want an alternative to the RSS for our blog. We have about 5 times the subscribers to our mailing list than to our RSS feed via FeedBurner.
Zookoda is better than a straight RSS -> email service because it treats the email as a first class citizen. It gives you measurable stats on the results of the mail outs, lets you customize the templates etc.
It’s like a full fledged email mailing list manager that happens to have RSS->Email capability built in. Love it!
Do they put Zookoda ads on emails?
I’m giving Zookoda a test run along with Yutter - Know More Media is looking for other options besides the ol’ standby, FeedBlitz, to manage our email subscriptions, newsletters, etc. I like what I see so far but I think we’ll probably stick with Feedblitz and maybe Feedburner to avoid the hassle of switching over.
#9 Hi Easton - we’re an ol’ standby already?! Doesn’t take longn, does it?
Thanks for reminding everyone that FeedBlitz is #1, and - although not picked up by TechCrunch - FeedBlitz extended its full-feature RSS to mail services last week to delivering RSS-based autoresponders and episodic content distribution - http://feedblitz.blogspot.com/.....-blog.html As well as real-time metrics, unlike everyone else FeedBlitz also offers innovative email services such as OPML syndication (not just import/export).
The thing about Zookoda is that it is So much more than just a competitor to feedburner and feedblitz rss to email. FeedBlitz and Feedburner cannot offer the tools, tracking, or monitizable benifits that zookoda brings and is bringing to the table. FeedBlitz my currently be #1 but based on Zookoda’s growth and what they bring to the package, I think FeedBlitz should start sweatin’.
Ok, I’ve kinda ignored the whole rss-to-email thing because I thought, “Eh, who needs it? — I likes me feed readers.” But I guess curiosity and the possibility of finding a better way of doing things is getting the better of me, so I’d like to know how it works. I’m speaking purely as a consumer of blog posts, not as a blogger. For example, if I subscribed to TechCrunch via email, would I get multiple emails throughout the day, one for each new post, or only one email/day with all the posts. If the former, would notification be more immediate than with a typical online RSS aggregator? (Would an email go out immediately upon you making the post to TechCrunch?) Does this kind of thing vary from blog to blog depending upon which email subscription service each one uses?
I guess I’m hoping, Mike, that you’ll do a round-up of email RSS for blog readers, rather than for bloggers. I know how RSS works, I’m always trying out new aggregators and following developments, but I’m pretty clueless about how all of it translates to email.
I guess you can’t use this with just your own RSS feed like feedburner???
“You need an existing blog that is managed by Blogger, Yahoo! 360, MovableType, TypePad, WordPress, Bloglines or MSN Spaces. Once your account is created, you can add your blogs into Zookoda”
rss2.eu is probably worth a look, it’s not a pretty site, but the emails it sends out are pure text, so I don’t have to worry about my mail reader screwing with the formatting when the pictures are not included :).
I took one look at the registration page and clicked the close button on that tab.
I am not about to give my personal contact information out in the footer of all my emails.
Saspa, it’s probably inevitable that a company providing an email delivery platform like Quivamail is going to be accused by someone at some stage of being spammers. Even though, of course, it’s the people using the platform that would be guilty of spamming, not the developers of the platform.
But I’ve used Quivamail too, and both it and Zookoda have always had very strong anti-spam measures in place - they seem prepared to lose a few potential customers (e.g. James above) rather than risk someone using the platform to spam.
James, the contact information doesn’t have to be personal information if you’re representing a company, it can be company information. But the footer information is a really effective way of discouraging people from using Zookoda as a spam tool. We should all be in favour of such measures.
also Mike, yes, you can use any RSS feed, not just one hosted by one of the ‘name’ blog services.
Why is it here in Australia there is no-one doing anything interesting and really out there. I mean some of these web2.0 startups are quite out there and far fetched butnonetheless interesting and pushing the boundaries. In Australia however, all we seem to have are email applications or other boring stuff designed to fill a specific daily need.
I think Aussies should get more creative and try to push the boundaries some more. It’s still great to see more of us releasing web products but I’d just love to see something ingenius come from Australia. It’d make me proud.
Zookoda certainly *looks* perfect - I’ve just emailed them with a few questions to see if that’s going to be true. As for the spammers comment above, the Google Group entry appears to label them that for operating ‘opt out’ rather than ‘opt in’, so it may be either (a) a grumpy customer or (b) a question of definition (and legislation, depending on where you are)
Hi,
I’ve been using zookoda but unfortunately my subscribers with hotmail address wont get any newsletters. I contacted them. They respond.
But the problem hadn’t solved yet.
Don’t know actually what the problem is!