Ziggs - ZZzzzz

Ziggs announced yesterday that the Ziggs People Hub^TM would allow online users a free utility for organizing the Internet around their people, their work and their lives. The people hub allows users to customize their own hub for organizing and communicating with people and assisting with managing a variety of online activities central to professional life.

Tim DeMello, founder and CEO of Ziggs, said, “The Internet has proven to be a great way for people to connect. Web 2.0 capabilities are expanding, social networking and profile sites are exploding, but no one has really served up those technologies and exciting new interaction possibilities in a way that works for the adult, professional market. This is the market Ziggs has served since 2004, and we believe that our innovative approach to building personalized people hubs will allow users relevant and rich interactions in a professional environment.”

The Ziggs Hub is an easy-to-use, unified hub for organizing your network contacts. Users can instantly create a personalized Ziggs hub by importing contacts directly from Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, or Excel spreadsheet. Once contacts are imported, you can organize the people into Ziggs Group Builder^TM, easily making meaningful groups of coworkers, consultants, colleagues or other pertinent groups. Users can navigate between people, institutions like banks, news sites or online stores with the click of a mouse.

“We are also delighted to offer a unique set of integrated, peer-to-peer online services for professionals from our three new category partners; services that are designed to give Ziggs members new convenient ways to strengthen relationships and improve efficiency in daily business-related tasks,” added Tim DeMello. “Ziggs is pleased to announce that we have teamed up with Amazon.com, PayPal and Starbucks to deliver these new services. Now transactions such as showing appreciation by sending a cup of coffee, sending payments, and sending gift incentives are centralized, simple and easy to do.”

Ziggs also provides the most powerful online profile service available for free. The Ziggs Profile^TM for professionals has been enhanced to add new content relevant to your Ziggs, like resume and blog. Email alert is also an added feature and allows you to be contacted every time your Ziggs profile is accessed.

Ziggs Index of Professionals^TM and Ziggs people search engine are now integrated into the Ziggs Hub for a searchable content on millions of professionals. The Ziggs next generation search results display the authorized and actionable data on professionals including communications icons, services icons and content icons that enable the user to connect with people with much greater effectiveness.

About Ziggs

They told us enough, and I can only say the company name a few more times before my “z” key wears out. They are from Boston, Mass.

The Take

Does the iPhonedo all this stuff? Maybe it doesn't and I am just being smug. I just get a picture of 100 brief case toting, dark suit clad, self important, preppy “go getters” jabbering business lingo at a local Starbucks saying: “Did you Zig me? I Zigged you!” Maybe I am just bitter since being ostracised from “Executive Land” for wearing cut offs to meetings. This site is well done, and this new feature is effective, but I am not sure a real “go getter” would need such a service. I mean if this thing goes big, people like Bill Gates and other CEO's will be getting cups of coffee from 10,000 people. Back in the day, you had to get in proximity to the big cheese before you could do a decent job of sucking up!

We get to a point people, where the amount of communication erodes the quality of communication. If you focus on genuine excellence and integrity, there is something out there that will fulfill your greatest dreams. Which would you rather have, 5 really good conversations with 5 really wonderful clients, or 600 contacts that hardly know you or you them? Let's not spread the human existence too thin, or we will all become just a bit of information. Web 2.0 is about sharing our individuality for a better Web, not becoming merchandising clones!