Zooomr, the company launched by 17 year old Kristopher Tate (he’s now 18) in March, will be releasing a new beta version 2.0 sometime around the end of June. The biggest focus of the new release will be increased stability and speed – Zooomr was taken down repeatedly by massive traffic spikes around its launch.
There’s a lot I like about Zooomr, but where they are really pushing the envelope is on photo metadata, particularly geotagging via a mashup with Google maps. Zooomr is also creating technology to help people understand when events are occuring, possibly via photos from users that don’t even know each other. When Zooomr sees photos being uploaded within a time window that are similarly geotagged, it assumes an event is occuring and groups those photos accordingly. The only difficult part of all of this is that it takes a lot of time for a user to associate location information with a photo…and that means many users won’t do it.
Look out for smart sets in version 2.0 as well, giving users the ability to create dynamic albums on the fly based on tags, users and other information. I really like this feature in the new Yahoo Photos and expect it to be widely copied by all of the photo sites over time.
Zooomr is also focused on creating localized version of the service in as many different languages as possible. In the 2.0 release they’ll add Romania and Norway to the sixteen other versions they currently support. For non English speakers, Zooomr may be the most compelling photosharing option.
There are lots of other feature additions as well. I’ll update as the new version is released.