Phonezoo Blog

Since you are reading this, you have probably already noticed Phonezoo’s new look.  We hope you like it, but either way, we invite you to share your thoughts and comments with us by replying to this post.  We wanted to share some of the thinking behind the new design.

Why did we redesign the site?  Well, when we polled some of you a couple of months ago, we found there were a lot of things you loved about Phonezoo, though our site design wasn’t at the top of the list.  It’s not that you hated the old design or anything, but it was just sort of ‘whatever’.  And truthfully, it did sort of look like a turn of the century (circa, 1999) design.  Functional, simple, but nothing to get too excited about.  But we knew we could do better.  We tried to come up with something that addressed a couple of your concerns while bringing the design deeper into the 21^st century.

The first thing we wanted to do was to make it easier to find the content you are looking for.  We know you spend a ton of time on the site and do a ton of searches for content.  The average visitor looks at more than 40 pages per day, and many people look at a lot more pages than that.  We now have more than 725,000 unique ringtones on the site, which can be a lot to wade through (and people are making more every minute).  So we grouped all the ways to find content into one area.  You can now search for ringtones by artist or title, browse by category, filter by copyrighted or not, filter by most popular, most recent, etc. and even browse by popular tags.  We hope this makes it easier to find something that reflects your style.

The second thing we wanted to do was to highlight the large, dynamic, creative, Phonezoo community.   Believe it or not, we have signed up over 1 million users since we launched last November.   The new ‘Who’s at the Zoo’ section on the right shows off the breadth of the Phonezoo community, and the pictures you see will update every minute.  So how do we decide who to put up there?  Well, first of all, you need to be logged in (duh).  Then we look to see if you have uploaded a picture (it would be pretty boring if we didn’t show people’s pics).  And finally, we look for people who have created/saved several ringtones so that others can get an idea of what’s popular/different/interesting.

At the end of the day, we want to offer you a site that’s easy to use, that keeps you coming back often, and that you are proud to recommend to your friends.

Please let us know what you think.  This is just the beginning of things to come…

Many of you have written to us in recent weeks to express frustration about not getting every ringtone you send to your phone.  I wanted to let you know what is happening and what can be done about it.

If you never get ringtones from Phonezoo, the first thing to do is to see if you have some sort of spam blocker on your account.  Contact your wireless company to ensure they are not blocking messages from support@phonezoo.com and from our shortcode – 69964. 

However, the most common problem right now is that sometimes you receive the text messages, and sometimes you don’t.  We’ve found that this issue primarily impacts Cingular/AT&T users.  During peak periods, the wireless carriers’ messaging system seems to get overloaded, and they appear to just drop some messages without delivering them.  This is why you sometimes don’t get a ringtone.

Believe me, we are working on technical solutions to this problem.  However, as Phonezoo continues to grow, we expect the challenges to grow along with us.  Right now we send hundreds of thousands of ringtones to people every day, a number that has grown rapidly since our launch last November.

So, what can you do about this?  We have two suggestions:

1.  If you don’t receive the text message with your ringtone in about 15 minutes, try sending it again.  And if you can do it outside of peak hours – before 11am (Pacific Time) or after 7pm – your odds of success are much greater.

2.  Even Better – get your ringtone without getting a text message.  Did you know you can download a ringtone without getting the text message first?  You can get any ringtone you’ve saved in MyZoo from our WAP site.  (WAP means Wireless Access Protocol, or basically the way you get on the Internet from your phone).  The process is pretty easy:

Step 1. Get on the Internet from your phone (launch your web browser)
Step 2. Enter our WAP Address: http://wap.phonezoo.com
Step 3. Login to your Phonezoo account (use same user name & password that you use on the website)
Step 4. Bookmark the page to avoid having to log in every time (first time only)
Step 5. Select the ringtone you want to download
Step 6. A page with ringtones in MyZoo will be shown. Select a link to start the download. Once the download has completed, you can save and configure the ringtone using your phone’s menu options

We encourage you to try WAP access – no more waiting for text messages to arrive (and it won’t count against your monthly text message limit either).  Please note: WAP Access will not work for Verizon Wireless customers.  We realize this is frustrating for many of you and we will keep working on it.

And for those of you confused about Cingular/AT&T or whatever they are called now, Stephen Colbert explains it all for us:

So I had a chance to look at the iPhone over the weekend.  I didn’t pony up $599 to buy one or stand in line, but a friend let me play with his.  We’ve also heard from a couple of early adopters who are big Phonezoo fans.

So the bad news is that the iPhone does not appear to play any Phonezoo ringtones.  Apparently, it’s not just us – it doesn’t seem to be able to get ringtones from any other source.  We tried a few different things and none of them worked.  The iPhone even strips .mp3 files from email attachments.  So sorry iPhone fans, we haven’t yet found a way for your shiny new device to work with Phonezoo.  But we’ll keep trying.

The future of the iPhone and ringtones open to much speculation.  Macrumors.com hypothesizes that you will soon be able to buy ringtones through iTunes.  That doesn’t appear to be the case as of this posting, but we’ll see.

And if you don’t actually own an iPhone but want your older (cheaper?) phone to sound like one, there’s always your own iPhone ringtone