January 22, 2010

Zoocasa is Now 1,000% Faster!

Hello All,

Clustering listings has allowed us to vamp up our speed. You might be asking yourself “What the heck is clustering?” Sitting at my desk today, while snacking on some grapes, I came up with a fruit comparison to explain the changes on our site. I have not seen any other tech blogger use fruit to explain map clustering and knew that the Zoocasa Blog was the place for this first.

Apples, like home listings on the old Zoocasa map, are individual spots. If you are faraway, you see the whole tree and all of the individual apples on it. That is a lot of info. On our old map, we only showed you 25 listings at a time, because showing you all of the individual listing spots would have made the site really slow.

We know that you want more than 25 listings at a time. So we moved to a new system, one more similar to grapevines than to apple trees. With grapes, when you stand back, you see bunches. Only as you look closer do you see each individual grape on a stem. Now, when zoomed out, listings on the new Zoocasa map show up as bunches. This makes the site faster, as we are not trying to pinpoint every individual listing from miles away.

Now we give you big blue dots, that represent a bunch of listings in a general area. The blue dots tell you how many listings are in that area (way more than 25) without having to point out each individual spot. Only as you zoom in, do you see each individual listing on the map.

According to your feedback, you are really liking the new system. If you have not had a chance to try it out, go to Zoocasa.com and plug in your favourite city now. Let us know what you think and the next time you reach for some grapes, be sure to think of Zoocasa’s great new design!

Happy house hunting,
Vanessa