Flickr has some catching up to do

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1. Paul Bragiel
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 6:55 pm

   Kris is a rockstar!

2. Kristopher Tate
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 6:57 pm

   Thanks Mike!

   I hope that somehow this next wave of Photo Sharing sites reaches the core of photos and uses that metadata to help people find each other.

   I’ve also got an open letter up that talks about how I feel about photos and zooomr.

   http://beta.zooomr.com/about/letter

   Kristopher Tate

3. BillyG
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 7:05 pm

   I was sent a TP to my Google account and still couldn’t login thru their login service, maybe next time.

4. bm
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 7:46 pm

   It would be nice if people could come up with original names instead of using the flickr naming scheme, especially when they are competing with flickr. Also original logos…

5. Zoli Erdos
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 8:02 pm

   Kris, if the whole thing took 3 months, can you pleeeeaaase add Flickr integration by next week! :-)))

6. Mike Jones
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 8:05 pm

   So Kris who is only 17 years old wrote the entire site from start to finish in 3 months and also in 16 languages all by himself?

   Bill Gates better step aside as this kid is the new genius on the block, or perhaps there were more people involved?

7. Mike Jones
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 8:25 pm

   The enthusiasm of techcrunch is great, but if you want to be taken more seriously, you may want to tone down these bizarre claims you so often make about these new sites. zooomr seems like a promising application but clearly its not near anywhere flickr just yet. To say “flickr has some catching up to do” is quite an exaggeration and not true.

8. Wendell Davis
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 8:32 pm

   Mike: Translators were of course involved, but aside from that, Kris did everything.

9. Michael Arrington
   

   March 11th, 2006 at 8:46 pm

   Mike Jones - Thanks for the comment…but it this case I think your criticism is unwarranted. Zooomr works pretty damn well, and some of the features, like geotagging and audio clips, should have been in flickr ages ago. My opinion stands.

10. Matt Burris
    

    March 11th, 2006 at 9:03 pm

    Mike Jones, aren’t you supposed to add your phone number to the post? (Sorry, thought it was the Houston-based rapper at first.)

    In all seriousness, this looks like a great service, and I agree with Mr. Arrington, there’s enough new features here that Flickr will likely feel the fire under their butt.

    Sure, the name scheme is similar, but these days, it’s hard to come up with unique domain names, and to alot of people Flickr=photo sharing, and so zooomr will likely get the photo sharing vibe from people when they first hear it. I think that’s smart, if you ask me.

    I would like to add, if it’s not available or not in the pipelines right now, to have a feature built into the service to backup all photos to a .zip file. I know it’s probably a scary thought for bandwidth reasons, but the peace of mind might convince more people to purchase the pro subscription, which can help with bandwidth.

    Nice work overall on zooomr, I look forward to seeing it grow.

11. Michael Arrington
    

    March 11th, 2006 at 9:08 pm

    great idea Matt

12. Kenneth Jr
    

    March 11th, 2006 at 9:10 pm

    Flickr has some catching up to do? The situation is clearly the other way around; a newly launched product, especially in this “age of betas”, is always going to be far behind established players, in terms of practical usage and widespread adoption.

13. Kristopher Tate
    

    March 11th, 2006 at 9:13 pm

    >I would like to add, if it’s not available or not in the pipelines right now, to have a feature built into the service to backup all photos to a .zip file.

    Matt, this is exactly what I have planned for Pro and Premium accounts. The only reason it is not enabled at current is bandwidth concerns — which should be remedied shortly.

14. Paul Irving
    

    March 11th, 2006 at 9:18 pm

    Here’s another one for the mentioned next wave of photo sharing sites: imgSeek (http://our.imgseek.net/). It’s a site for social photo bookmarking: They are trying to be the digg.com for images.

    Basically you can search similar images, tag, rate and get recommendations.

    Here’s an example of similar image search: http://our.imgseek.net/image/show/5250

15. Matt Burris
    

    March 11th, 2006 at 9:28 pm

    Kristopher: If I could’ve edited my post, I would’ve suggested that as that was what occurred to me after I read my post.

    That’s a good way to motivate people to pay for the pro account. To be able to backup photos at will is nice, especially as you so well put it, they contain such precious memories.

16. Saul Weiner
    

    March 11th, 2006 at 10:25 pm

    3 months? I love the idea. Can it handle the scale though? This will be awesome if it can handle Flickr like traffic. That’ll be the real test.

17. Mike
    

    March 11th, 2006 at 10:45 pm

    Seventeen? God, I feel old.

18. Ramon
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 2:21 am

    I totally disagree with anyone who says this site is superior to Flickr. It’s just a 1on1 copy of flickr at that! Flickr is a lot more userfriendly than zooomr, even tho flickr isn’t even that userfriendly…

    But hey, if you guys wanna hype everything that comes along, don’t let me stop you.

19. Shelley
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 6:23 am

    The ability to geotag photos has always been there with Flickr. As for rendering a Google map, consider who owns Flickr for a moment. Several of us have created our own pages that render the map from geotags, and people haven’t been terribly excited. This just isn’t a feature that a majority of the users want–especially when they realize they have to find and input the geotag (the photos don’t automagically geotag themselves, unless the info is in the meta attached to the photo). Most cameras aren’t GPS equipped.

    As for adding audio, BubbleShare already has this, and again, you’ll find most people don’t really care. Wizzy stuff–tech toys.

    The site doesn’t look that much different from Flickr, and I think has a n inferior interface when it comes to sizing. Does it have an API? You didn’t mention that.

    Let’s be blunt, you’re less impressed with the site than you are with the fact that the creator is 17. Yet, he’s using well known techniques already pioneered by other companies and creators (sorry, most of whom are older). And, as was mentioned, we’ll see how it scales.

    And besides: what a lovely buzz generating title you have.

    (Oh, and before it be seen that I’m rushing in to defend Flickr, as soon as my application is finished to replace images in my posts with locally based ones, I’m canceling my account. Service is good, and has scaled, but I’m finding that centralized web services, social software, and candy apps are just so five minutes ago. )

20. Kay Bærulfsen
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 7:01 am

    Uhm, it serving me pages at a very low rate atm. It took zoomr.com almost two min to display the /photos page.

    (no, English is not my primary language

21. Mike Jones
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 7:01 am

    Well at least I’m not the only one who thinks flickr isn’t inferior to zooomr.

22. Zoli Erdos
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 7:44 am

    Shelley, what’s the trend for the “next five minutes”?

23. samper
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 7:54 am

    I tried this out. Too slow this morning to be of any use. Growing pains perhaps?

24. Jason
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 9:17 am

    Yeah, Mike, I agree with a few others here — the site is nice, but it really isn’t in the same league as Flickr quite yet. Don’t get me wrong — it’s impressive as hell that a teenager can create a pretty well-implemented photo sharing site in three months — but it’s pretty raw (it honestly makes me think that it’s designed to get the righthand bar ads in my face more than the functionality), it’s *very* slow, a lot of the UI is a direct copy of Flickr, and a lot of Flickr’s *great* UI features aren’t replicated at all. (Honestly, I’m not trying to be petulant, but there are too many UI issues to list them here, but it all comes down to the polish not being there.)

    And I feel that I have to mention something just to get it out there: it’s *much* easier to implement a well-functioning UI if you’re copying a well-functioning UI from someone else, someone who put a lot of time and effort into developing that UI. That’s not to say that there’s an inherent problem with that — it’s part of the history of computing — but it does speak to the ability to get something like zooomr off the ground so quickly. (And looking at the features that are newly-implemented in zooomr rather than copied from Flickr, the difference in polish is striking.)

25. Pat Berry
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 10:37 am

    Over a year ago Flickr was getting over 60,000 photos uploaded a day.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/onli.....74,00.html

    In June of 2005 it was estimated that it was growing by 30% per month.

    http://www.internetnews.com/ec.....hp/3512866

    Flickr has moved past the “Getting Real” stage where you worry about scaling later. It’s later for Flickr and they scale now better than ever before. I may be biased for having been with Flickr for a while. But call me when zooomr can handle millions of uploads, comments, taggings a day…then you can claim Flickr has some “catching up” to do because what good are all those features if the site is always down?

    All that being said, zooomr looks like a sweet piece of work.

26. Ryan
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 10:42 am

    It’s always great to see a new Web app.

    Of course, if I were to ever even consider switching away from Flickr, it would be to a site that could automatically import all my old Flick photos for me. Or at least tried to make it easy.

    I looked in the Help and all 8 Learn More slides and didn’t see anything on importing such data. Which makes me think not much though has yet been put into exporting, either.

27. Todd Zeigler
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 11:30 am

    Add me to the list of folks who found the site too slow to go through in any detail.

28. Billy Warhol
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    is there any way i can Import my 15,000 photos & 5,000 contacts from Flickr*

    ;))

    actually i luvv Flickr but it’s always nice to see what else is out there!

    i’ll take a looksee*

    Good Luck Kris on yer new zooomr!!*

    Cheers!! Billy ;))

29. Shelley
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 1:15 pm

    “Shelley, what’s the trend for the ‘next five minutes’?”

    Darn, Zolo, I wish I’d seen your comment an hour ago, because you missed out on at least four new candy apps–but three have already been bought by Yahoo, and Microsoft and Google are fighting over the fou…

    Oops, well, there went the fourth.

    But in the next five minutes I can tell you about a new candy app written by a 13 year old who calls herself BabyCakes the Avenger. It will be so cool: it cross-references Flickr photos with information contained in local law enforcement, federal (such as FBI, CIA, MI6), and Interpol files, and posts the results by name, country, home address, and criminal record.

    BabyCakes is torn on the name, though. Should she call it “Our Naught Neighborhood”? Or just plain “F*ckers”.

    Fun for all. Tag your friends.

    (PS to Kris and Zoomr — no reflection on your hard work and effort, both of which are comendable–but response is usually proportional to hype.)

30. Shelley
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 1:16 pm

    Sorry, should have been “Our Naughty Neighborhood”. I actually rather like this one myself.

31. Zoli Erdos
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 1:52 pm

    Shelley, you’re late, BabyCakes is not new, it’s a natural application for Riya, launched at Mike’s house quite some time ago

32. Kenny
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 4:31 pm

    Maybe the kid was just trying to get noticed by Yahoo!/Flickr to get a job in the Flickr group? Flattery?

33. Search Engines Web
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 7:37 pm

    Article Made it to Digg FrontPage just now

34. Dave
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 7:45 pm

    While it is a neat idea to have geotagging, audio commentary, etc., they are all bells and whistles. This new site suffers from Microsoft syndrome where adding features means better. When I share a picture of my wedding or of a party, I don’t care about geotagging. I care about the damn picture. The fluff is useless. That was what made flickr so great in the beginning, as opposed to shutterfly, etc. It focused on the user’s content.

35. Jawed Karim
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 8:06 pm

    This is good stuff…

36. Blaze
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 9:14 pm

    The site doesnt even work for me.

37. grumpY!
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 9:34 pm

    this is great for the millions of people who are screaming in the street that flickr is inadequate.

    80% of internet users do not know what a blog is. most users of google maps do not know the maps can be moved with a mouse.

    there is no market for zoomr, even if it is better.

38. Kristopher Tate
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 9:55 pm

    >there is no market for zoomr, even if it is better.

    grumpY, I’m afraid you’re incorrect about this. The simple reason behind all of this is that Zooomr is localized.

    The reason why most of these people don’t know about Web2.0 and associated sites is that most of this technology is coming from English speaking countries and most of it is worded in a highly technical way (RSS, WebBlog, et cetera).

    I’m trying to break-through this. I’m trying to create a place where the entire world can join in.

    A better question might be why I understand this and have executed on it, where others have not.

39. mirage
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 11:18 pm

    > The reason why most of these people don’t know about Web2.0 and associated sites is that most of this technology is coming from English speaking countries and most of it is worded in a highly technical way … I’m trying to break-through this.

    Spreading the gospel of Web2.0 to non-english speakers is nothing to proud about. Web2.0 zealots act like they are evangelizing something new and precious that needs their hype. The sad truth is that all you’re doing is getting way to excited about a natural progression that arrived way before your little buzzword gave you a flag to rally around. The worst part is that rather than celebrating principles of feature rich interactivity, people like you want to be praised for dumbed things down for the masses. Apple will tell you, this makes perfect business sense. You would transform the web into a sea of huge fonts and endless whitespace. For what? Greed. True geeks spit on Web2.0 because they recognize it for what it is; one giant pastel glossy step towards our worst romper-room web nightmares.

    Localization a geotagging won’t save zoomr from obscurity. You’re too late.

40. Michael Arrington
    

    March 12th, 2006 at 11:18 pm

    After reading these comments as well as a couple of private emails, I agree that zooomr and other sites hoping to compete with flickr need a mechanism for importing flickr photos.

    However, I will say that flickr is not nearly as popular in the rest of the world as it is in the U.S., and zooomr’s multi-language support is perfectly tailored to attack this marked.

41. CrunchWatcher
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 12:17 am

    “However, I will say that flickr is not nearly as popular in the rest of the world as it is in the U.S.”

    What makes you say that? Know something we don’t?

    “and zooomr’s multi-language support is perfectly tailored to attack this marked.”

    Which marked? There are a lot of markeds out there

    Thinking like that, I bet you think the Creative Zen Micro is just about to smoke the iPod too - more features, cheaper per GB, and available with more localized UIs …

42. Illusion
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 1:20 am

    It is funny to listen to marketing level people argue about what is original/better/whatever. All of this is taking place at a very immature level in technology. Get over it.

43. Werner
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 2:57 am

    […]I will say that flickr is not nearly as popular in the rest of the world as it is in the U.S.

    Who gave you that idea?? Look around, see how fast Flickr grows, see at all the different groups covering *ALL* the world, see how strong people reacted on the fact that Flickr was (is?) banded in the UAE…

    Zoomr is a *bad* copy of *great* idea, just my 2c and YEP English is not my first language (not even my second)

44. Jack
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 6:04 am

    Looks neat, but zooomr “has some catching up to do” in the datacenter department.

45. anthony
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 6:06 am

    Genius? No. I’ve been a professional developer since I was 17, and I’m not genius. Gifted MAYBE. I know exactly what it takes to build these kind of applications and trust me, it only requires a little time to learn how. Just depends on how you fare with grasping concepts of logic and abstraction.

    Almost all developers build these sort of things and never do anything with it, this kid just applied it where most of us don’t. Point is, there are probably hundreds to thousands of developers his age that we will never know about because they keep quiet.

    Is the world truly so dillusional?

    I applaud that he actually applied his application. So grats.

    But don’t build up an ego over this, it’s not good for you.

46. andrew
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 7:37 am

    how long until google takes this, and makes it free?

    im not using some shitty service that give me a whopping 50mb of picture uploads.

    oh yeah, im not paying for it either.

47. August West
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 8:32 am

    “just so five minutes ago”? how cute!

48. Shelley
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 12:42 pm

    “However, I will say that flickr is not nearly as popular in the rest of the world as it is in the U.S., and zooomr’s multi-language support is perfectly tailored to attack this marked”

    Based on what data?

    One of the most popular groups in Flickr has to do with the United Arab Emirates.

    So if localization is the issue, how is zoomr going to deal with issues of nudity? How about people with tatoos of swastikas? Can’t show those in Germany or France.

    There’s more to internationalization than translating bits of text.

    Web 2.0: More hype, less filling.

49. Michael Arrington
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 1:10 pm

    Shelley - just based on the data that Yahoo shared with me and I published here - http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/Yahoo-Photos/

    and comments left on a post i did about a site called 23 here http://www.techcrunch.com/2005.....ke-flickr/

50. schmidt
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

    Funny.
    Oberkirch is a city in Germany near Straßbourg.
    http://www.oberkirch.de/

51. Kord Campbell
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 1:47 pm

    Looks like the site is being crushed by the Digg effect. It’s great that it has cool features, but without scalability, those features are worthless.

    Going the way most threads go on Photo hosting site, it always is about Flickr, sn’t it? I think Flickr is great, but its features are not suitable for the mainstream market. It is therefore reasonable to expect that new players will arrive on the scene doing things better than Flickr does, and using newer and newer technology to do it.

    The advantage these new guys have is that they are agile - whereas Flickr is now stuck in the goo that is Yahoo and is slow to change. BTW, updating the article to post something regarding a Flickr/Yahoo offering is a bit lame, Michael.

    I’d like to point out that a site that gives Flickr users geotagging capabilities is not the same as Flickr doing geotagging themselves. A site that gives Flickr users Digg’ish capabilities is not the same as Flickr doing rankings themselves.

    Creating or aggregating this data off-site poses an issue as you aren’t integrating it back into the system from which it came.

    For example, while photos can be “geotagged” on Flickr, you can’t do a system-wide update on photos that are within a certain radius of another photo - on Flickr, like Zoomr does. Doing that operation requires the entire data set be on hand - in context for searching, then queried and returned.

    The long and short of it is that competition is healthy, and it results in incremental improvements over existing services - sometimes in huge steps, sometimes in baby ones.

52. Eduardo
    

    March 13th, 2006 at 3:31 pm

    So many detractors….

    Tsk, Tsk Tsk…

    Give the kid a break to get off the ground!

    Anybody remembers where digg.com come from?

53. ravo
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 1:19 am

    Hey! is Google or any other Big Brother is planning to buy it?

54. Tom
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 1:25 am

    Is that a rails app I spy?

    That would explain the fast turn round

55. eggnog
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 2:26 am

    what a massive pile of web2.0 wank.

56. gene
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 2:45 am

    damn shelley what crawled up your ass!

57. Andy
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 4:28 am

    I have no doubt that a single person can match the productivity of a team of programmers for producing functionality. See the book Mythical Man Month for details on why that’s not enough.

58. kimblim
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 4:28 am

    Nothing wrong with zoomr in my mind - but the article does overhype it though! good luck to Kris..

    And in case no-one knows of http://www.23hq.com, they should take a look, as it is a similar service - and no, I am in no way associated with the people behind it.

59. joe
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 4:29 am

    Can’t wait for the exploits!

60. Bigduke
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 5:33 am

    Hail Zoomr!

    I hope it gets to the new datacenter soon so that I can review it myself. The i18n support is VERY interesting. Flickr in my opinion isn’t all that complicated except teh fact that it exposes an open multiplatform API for access and has some good info security features. Overall its a very simple app really… lets see if Zoomr beats that.

61. Nick Soper
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 5:35 am

    Nice ideas, shame the server is overloaded by slashdot (people like me)

    Can’t wait to see it.
    Nicko

62. doug
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 6:34 am

    The real question is …

    Will it scale well as the user base grows? This is the true test of any fee based web service.

63. Pete
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 6:48 am

    Nice job Kris - kudos. I noticed that your site was down due to heavy traffic, so I wasn’t able to snag a description off your site, but I’d love to add it to my directory. If you’d like to either contact me with a short description, or enter it into my site yourself, that would be great. http://web2.0fusion.com

64. SomaMusic
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 7:37 am

    I want to write a theme song for Zooomr!!!

    ‘Fuck Flickr” will be the the chorus.

    Am F G

65. SomaMusic
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 7:37 am

    I want to write a theme song for Zooomr!!!

    “Fuck Flickr” will be the the chorus.

    Am F G

66. gaumz
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 7:57 am

    Wow….. u r gr8….

    its really impressive work…. wish u have bright Future…

    gaumz…

67. Vikas Garg
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 8:00 am

    Good Work Kris !! Sound like I need to open up a new account !

68. james
    

    March 14th, 2006 at 8:08 am

    Damn look at all these bitter nerds. So someone gets the limelight and everyone’s jealousy, masked by reason, is evoked. Most of these *pro* nerds that have been in the