14 DAY TRIAL // Zooloo just went live today offering a hybrid between a customized home page, a la iGoogle, and a proper social network profile page, which today means Facebook. While this sounds somewhat interesting it isn't exactly revolutionary; however, the main draw for new users will be the option to have their own domain name for the site as evident from their slogan “Your name. Your domain. Your life.”
“Our mission is simply this – to create a smarter, more personal way to experience the Web for the everyday person,” said ZooLoo CEO Jeff Herzog. “We know people want online privacy, personalization and a site that is truly their own; these pieces are currently missing from the marketplace. We aspire to incorporate the best services and features on the Web to make ZooLoo everyone’s online home.”
The Scottsdale, Arizona-based startup aims to become the first place you go to when you open up your browser and the center of your online activities. It operates on a freemium model with a basic free offering with a username.zooloo.com URL but also allows users to select a .com, .net or .info domain for $29.99 a year or a .me domain name for $7.99 more.
The site offers a fully customizable dashboard to which you can add any number of widgets, but what makes it interesting is that it also offers some social media tools like a chat bar at the bottom of the interface as well as options to manage your media content at the top. The widgets range from YouTube videos to news articles to the all-time-favorite weather widget.
“ZooLoo brings everything that’s important to you into one place around your own domain name. Instead of going to multiple news, shopping and entertainment sites each day, visiting Facebook and Twitter and checking various e-mail accounts, you can do it all in one place with ZooLoo,” said Jill Miles, ZooLoo co-founder and spokesperson. “When friends visit your site, they can each have a completely different experience, based on the permissions you’ve set.”
There is great focus on making your ZooLoo.com page the only one you need to visit but whether the number of new features the service brings will be enough to challenge Facebook, or Google for that matter, remains to be seen. However, while the two Internet giants seem unmovable today, let's not forget that both companies started as the underdog.