Zooomr - the little train that could

Roger, I agree that Zooomr is far ahead in innovating compare to Flickr. As they say a photo speaks thousand words, so all their features to geo-tag, social community, etc will give life to static photos. Otherwise where is fun of Second or Virtual life 

However when it comes to adding more features, I am to believe that “customer is not always aware of what is possible” so one must be prepared to go through long gestation period to educate the customer and the feature must not be too advanced.

Rather than playing the game with Flickr, Zooomr should move on and create niche. I will be happy to brain dump if Kris is interested There are many ways to monetize Zooomr and build market-leading communities. I believe Mark III is aimed at such niche creation.

I wish Zooomr team all the best to lead the market and disrupt Flickr’s First Mover Advantage.

I couldn’t agree more.

“most of Flickr’s recent features the ‘gamma’ upgrade were literally ‘borrowed’ off Zooomr, such as the use of Geo-tagging, and tagging features just generally to name a couple.”

i guess you’ve drunk the kool-aid.

want to know where zooomr stole geotagging from? the geobloggers.com web service. it worked with the flickr api. want to know where the guy who created geobloggers.com [Rev Dan Catt] is working now?

that’s right, flickr.

want to know when flickr hired him?

before zooomr launched geotagging.

zooomr’s innovations are essentially limited to people tags [you've got those on facebook photos] and marketplace [not yet launched, flickr announced their intention to launch a marketplace function months before zooomr did]

the reason why you THINK zooomr is more innovative than flickr is because they take ideas flickr has rumored or announced they will implement, or features created in the flickr greasemonkey community, and implement them faster than flickr does. they can implement the ideas not because kris tate is an innovative genius, but because they have zero use rbase and don’t have to build the features with thought to how they will scale.

you think being on Ustream is a tough thing for zooomr to do? look at how much they enjoy talking about the number of users in their chat room, and grinning at the attention they are getting. it’s a massive ego trip for them. well, 100 people watching a Ustream vid is fine for boosting the ego, but 100 people no matter how avid do not a self-sustaining web-community make.

flickr innovates and flickr works. zooomr imitates and is down all the time.

“There are many ways to monetize Zooomr and build market-leading communities. I believe Mark III is aimed at such niche creation.

I wish Zooomr team all the best to lead the market and disrupt Flickr’s First Mover Advantage.”

yeah, because the point of this isn’t to create stable ground and infrastructure for people to explore their creativity .. it is about following who has the ‘market advantage’ and who can ‘monetize’ and build ‘market-leading activities’.

sounds like you’ve been reading too much techcrunch. for the vast majority of human beings finding new ground on the web this is about creativity, expression and cultural change, not bizdev bullshit.

finally, to call the flickr ‘gamma’ upgrade [which geotagging wasn't even a part of, as you imply] a rip off of zooomr only exposes your ignorance and is completely unfair to the people who zooomr have borrowed from on their road to unstable mediocrity, like Rev Dan Catt.

Well what I can I say… the cool-aid it is then.

However I do only want to take issue with one thing, whether you appreciate what I am saying or not, I would like you to not speak towards those who comment like you speak towards me.

Please come back and comment often, your point of view is valuable and clearly you know your stuff, that being said remember to respect those who comment on my site or I will take issue with it.

Thanks for coming by..
Roger

i apologize to your commenter. the word “monetize” really gets my dander up. i understand that there is a business side to this and that he business side is vitally important to sustaining the enterprise .. but at the end of the day that really isn’t what this is all about. not for me, anyway. .. nor do i think that this is what it’s about for most people.

oh, zooomr has innovated in one other area that flickr will be expanding into soon. localization. but before you attribute this to flickr “borrowing” from zooomr, i’d suggest you do a bit of research into the less theatrical but more interesting competitive relationship between flickr and fotolog, which i will suggest is much more of a motivating force than zooomr.

fotolog is the real story here, and its relationship with flickr is fascinating. did you know that technical failures at fotolog caused the first influx of serious hobbyist photographers to flickr, essentially making flickr’s reputation? that over the past year or so fotolog has regained its footing, slowly overtaking flickr, even as flickr continues to grow? that this is mostly due to appeal in international markets, where flickr is gearing up to compete with fotolog in the next year?

this is interesting, is it not?

the one interesting thing zooomr has up its sleeve is marketplace and it’s not even going to be part of mark III. i’ve been following zooomr since first launched and they’ve continued to disappoint with each release, both in terms of lack of community growth and in terms of a lack new approaches to social photosharing. zooomr is indeed flickr on steroids, along with all the awful side effects steroids can bring. they’re trying to be like flickr but with MORE STUFF, but more stuff is only good if it is useful stuff. otherwise it is only baggage, and detrimental to the service overall.

fotolog, on the the other hand, has continually impressed with its unique approach - different from flickr and indeed as popular or possibly more popular than flickr. it’s streamlined, simple, intuitive, fresh and stable. i know more people who have switched to fotolog from flickr than have switched to zooomr .. just that they don’t make a theatrical production of it when they do.

Hmmm, I never took a look at fotolog in hmmm years?

I will now and thanks for pointing out what they are doing.

Regarding some of the things you mentioned with Zooomr, I will say firstly that clearly they won’t show up on Alexa because they have too few users, and that mostly significantly due to some business aspects I can’t disclose and also the fact that it uses OpenID.

I have told Kris and published about this long ago that Zooomr must dump OpenID as its primary form of registration.

Once the OpenID is fixed it should be interesting to see how fast they grow their user base. I think it would be more interesting to compare then but even so I would probably just watch growth for the first 12 months.

Mark III will have marketplace according to my understanding from Kris, but I think they are taking a bit of thought about the PR aspects by not just opening it like EuroDisney and no one shows up. That would be embarassing and could hurt the long-term value of the marketplace for all stakeholders.

The feature is in Mark III, its just not enabled. Hopefully they do open the marketplace and its done right as that is what as you said they will be uniquely identified for as that will be their differential feature.

Oh well, I learned much from your comments not least of which is to remember that I should take greater care to make my posts more accurate, which I usually do but this time I just wanted to hype a bit for a friend.

Cheers

Hmmm, I never took a look at fotolog in hmmm years?

I will now and thanks for pointing out what they are doing.

Regarding some of the things you mentioned with Zooomr, I will say firstly that clearly they won't show up on Alexa because they have too few users, and that mostly significantly due to some business aspects I can't disclose and also the fact that it uses OpenID.

I have told Kris and published about this long ago that Zooomr must dump OpenID as its primary form of registration.

Once the OpenID is fixed it should be interesting to see how fast they grow their user base. I think it would be more interesting to compare then but even so I would probably just watch growth for the first 12 months.

Mark III will have marketplace according to my understanding from Kris, but I think they are taking a bit of thought about the PR aspects by not just opening it like EuroDisney and no one shows up. That would be embarassing and could hurt the long-term value of the marketplace for all stakeholders.

The feature is in Mark III, its just not enabled. Hopefully they do open the marketplace and its done right as that is what as you said they will be uniquely identified for as that will be their differential feature.

Oh well, I learned much from your comments not least of which is to remember that I should take greater care to make my posts more accurate, which I usually do but this time I just wanted to hype a bit for a friend.

Cheers