Assuming your confusion is real rather than disengenuous, proprietary is “good” for a company in that they are able to prevent competitors from using their technology. It is never better for users than “open”.

I don’t expect you’ll get a meaningful reply from the Marketing Executive.

As it turns out, we happen to use ZXTM (a proprietary piece of software in its own right) in a way that is unique to Zeus’ user base. That’s why they decided to do a press release about us.

Concerning your comment regarding Open Standards, I’m not sure if you are lobbing this at Zeus, or Zoto. Only Zeus can speak for themselves on their standardization practices, but I’m more than happy to rebut concerning Zoto.

With Zoto, AZTK and our website are designed to allow people to categorize and search their photo collections which are housed on our site. As with any site, the users have a choice of whether they use the system or not, and whether they add that extra data, or not.

Regardless, and because of the fact users may place additional data on the system that wasn’t in their possession otherwise, Zoto decided early on to provide XML feeds on user’s accounts, providing a way for the data to be recaptured by other software, or services. It is in this way that we provide a means by which a user could potentially move the meta data on their photos to another platform.

While I am not stating that I endorse all Open Standards lobbying, I do think that it is reasonable that data created on a service should be accessible in some way if the user wished to migrate to another service.

Please keep in mind that most of the services that Zoto provides, it does so for no charge. Most Open Standards issues arise because of cost concerns, not, as in the webmail market, whether you can get your email off one service onto another (which you can’t).

Kord Campbell, CEO
Zoto, Inc.