ZoeCity.com is positioned to become a leader in secure online communities among youth. The new global online community, based in Seattle, WA, has officially launched and leveraged itself alongside social community leaders MySpace and Facebook. Improving on safety, ZoeCity.com equips online users with revolutionary new security features that give the user full control of who they interact and share information with online. At the helm as the newly-appointed CEO is Colin Wong, who managed many of Google’s largest AdSense and AdWords customers.
While there are current social networks targeting Christian-related videos or church activities, ZoeCity is the first social network to cater exclusively to all activities around a Christian person’s life. “We aim to be the safe, secure, and Christian-focused alternative to Myspace and Facebook,” says Wong.
ZoeCity believes any Christian social-network must cater to all social activities instead of restricting to only church or videos. ZoeCity invites its users to post secular content as well, as long as it does not violate their code of conduct and content policy. However, any spiritual content must abide by the Christian faith.
What sets ZoeCity apart from other social networks is a strong focus on building trust in their communities. Social networks such as MySpace emphasize growing their user base at the cost of declining social accountability. ZoeCity returns this focus on accountability by providing a system called the Badge of Verification. User’s personal information such as name, address, and phone number can be verified and provides credibility to the community of this person‘s identity. When a person is held accountable, he or she is less likely to behave irresponsibly. It is harder to pose as a child, engage in cyber-bullying or promote sexually illicit content. “While no authentication system is ever perfect, we believe this is the first and right direction to building social responsibility,” says Colin Wong.
ZoeCity provides a white-label solution to churches, music artists and organizations to build their own social networks. A church can create its own network and control its community policies through ZoeCity content monitoring services and even requiring that all users be verified to a certain level.
A huge issue common in social networks today is the fact they treat all friends as the same. You are either a friend or a stranger to a user. If you are a friend then you get to see the entire user’s personal information. Unfortunately this does not mirror the real-world. In reality, we all have friends who are based on context. Your work friends are different from your best friends. They are also different from your family. ZoeCity allows you to segment your friends to different circles and then assign privacy rights to what they can or cannot see. Your acquaintance circle will not be able to see your birth date but your family circle can. This extra level of privacy control provides comfort and control to our user’s personal information.
