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.
Thanks for mentioning us again, Michael.
I dont know why Zooomr gets so much credit
Visually, it is one of the most complete rips of another site (flickr)
And it is suppose to host photos…so why would someone choose this over flickr whose established, stable, much more reliable, faster, better design, smoother ajax and easier to use?
Don’t really care for the colors, but I like competition between popular services. Keep it up Kris and the Zoomr team.
It’s ironic that you use flickr to host the screenshots of zoomr.
so.. is zooomr profitable?
Mike,
Just a small error on the post…
^There’s a lot I like about Zooomr, but THE where they are really pushing^
delete THE
get a life eric…nice one kris..
Eric, thanks for the typo note. Fixed.
Much Props to Kris. He has a very bright future ahead!
Very nice service, and I like the grouping schema. I like Zoomr a lot. Sometime soon I’m going to put together a basecamp group or something similar for all of the stakeholders in geotagging to make sure that different geotag/geoRSS formats don’t mess things up for all of us and create confusion.
Now – not to throw in a plug, but I have a similar (competing!) project that I think is worth mentioning. http://www.blockrocker.com maps out Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Blogs from Feedmaps, Events from Upcoming.org and Eventful, Blog posts from Technorati, and so on. And I believe it does so in a reasonably intuitive and simple to access manner.
I also index tags across all of the sites that I pull from, and offer a number of tools to making geotagging easier for bloggers, flickr users, and so on.
So again, I hate to horn in on someone else’s product mention, but I’d like to think the BlockRocker is a decent competitor to Zoomr and worth a visit.
In the meantime, Kris – great work. I’ll track you down over the weekend and drop you a line then, and until then, all the best!
Regards,
-rod.
You accidentally slipped the url into one of the pictures. I tried to email you the issue, but couldn’t find your email.
Even if it’s a visual “rip off”… The kid still deserves credit.
Good job, Kris.
what nobody seems to consider is that zooomr is simply too small to compete with flickr. unfortunately, i don’t know the exakt stats for zooomr, but http://www.alex....com+zooomr.com should give a first impression. i assume, that zooomr has about 10′000 to 30′000 visits a day (on the basis of their ranking).
nothing against zooomr (impressive performance by kris and so on), but the media attention it gets stays in NO relation to its size (and as already mentioned, it’s nothing really new).
Damn, the people replying on TechChrunch these days are hypercritical. So, maybe this isn’t the most original idea. So? Originality is nice, yes, but it’s by no means necessary for sucess. Look at TV, advertising, music, games consoles…originality is nice, but not required. There is a new TV series launched every week, but we still watch repeats of Friends.
Zooomr is basically the same thing as Flickr, I hear you cry. Maybe, maybe not, I wouldn’t know, having never used either of them. But people like choice. Some people will prefer Zooomr just for it’s aethetics. Take the example of web-based email. Gmail added nothing substantially new to it, except for an unprecedented amount of storage, and a new interface. Why do I now use Gmail over Yahoo or Hotmail? I just happen to like the interface more. It doesn’t really do anything new, except archive my messages. I don’t care about that, it’s the design and feel of Gmail that I like.
Nobody can really predict what the response to this will be. The new beta hasn’t even been released yet.
Basile, we’ve got some pretty hard hitters for us now on our Corporate team. When Zooomr 2 launches, I’m sure you will hear about us in the news.
As for the Alexa ratings, those only make-up 50-60% of all Internet Explorer users. Zooomr, because of its early stages is not frequented by many people who use Internet Explorer — So, I can assure you that while we’re not doing nearly the traffic that Flickr is doing yet, we are doing much better than the rankings shown on Alexa.
-Kristopher
The trouble with Zoomr (as I see it) is that one cannot LOG IN! Or rather, one can, via gmail or whatever, and that gets you a temporay password only.
I have tried to create an account, but the register/enroll form does not work.
Perhaps that is why the site has not too many users?
Jim, I’m fixing that in Zooomr 2 — we know that it’s a pain, and you’ll be able to migrate over to a regular account.
-Kristopher
@CD (comment #2)
I agree, Zooomr sucks. Why is everybody so up in arms over some talented kid who ripped off Flickr?
Oh well, another “talented” kid in the 80’s ripped off Apple is now the richest man in the world.
I believe it was Picasso who once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.
I don’t understand the use of geotagging in general. Its good that you can geotag photo but how is this useful for masses. For once it takes a long time to find location while you can just tag a photo and move on. Anyways I like the lightbox functionality.
I don’t consider you as a threat to flickr but if you guyz stick around, you might become youtube of photos.
From my point of view, geotagging is interresting when you shoot fotos in many different locations. I’m planning a trip around the world, and then i think it could be a good way for my family and friends to follow my journey.
So i can’t speak for others, but thats why i believe its worth taking the time to geotag photos.
Besides that, it is a nice site, the lighthouse a streamr are great features i think.
-Kaser
Michael, what Browser did you use to make the pictures?
One of the best photo sharing sites out there. Still a little rough around the edges but it could be the number 1 photo sharing site this time next year, and i guess Kris is kind of sick of hearing this but the guy is like 18 which blows my mind. This kid is going places.
I’ve got to agree with the other people here who say the Zoomr site is just another Flickr (the front page in particular is an embarrasing rip-off of Flickr’s). The only thing here that I see that Flickr doesn’t already do is the Google Maps mashup for geotagging (but a Greasemonkey extension is all you need to fix that right now), and I just don’t see that smart tagging feature working in real life… At best people will tag the picture with the city it was taken in, and who’s to say that two photos taken in the same city around the same time are going to be from the same event. It also seems pointless, since more people are likely to tag the photos with the name of the event anyway.
FlickrImportr does the smart set thing for Flickr pre-upload, as well as handles geocoding automatically when you upload.
http://mbase.in...acelab-dev.com/
hi just want to encourage visitors k
Man this site load slow :S