Thomas hawk is nothing but a shill. In fact his real name is Andrew Peterson and he is what is wrong with Web 2.0 and blogging. To cover a space (digital photography) and then take an interest in a company and start M&A talks and pump them up on your blog constantly is just crap.

All these people in San Francisco that are friends and creating and hyping all this crap makes this new medium totally untrustworthy.

Has Michael Arrington recently had lunch with Andrew Peterson and Om Malik?

Total garbage, all of them.

Dave

The Zoomr folks seem nice enough, so I hope this is true for them. At the same time, I see nothing special about their tech or their userbase.

Having been involved on both sides of these sorts of deals, I can say that there are occasionally companies that want particular functionality, have a big enough user base where the ROI of biuying something to have it quickly makes sense rather than spending 6 months to build in-house, and the price is low enough for it to work.

But, I can’t see any company for which $5M makes sense. Yahoo has Flickr. Google has Picasa. Microsoft has a dozen photo products. FIM already has decent photo capabilities inside MySpace and integation would be harder than building from scratch. This doesn’t really match IAC’s or Viacom’s worldview. CNET has Webshots.

I can’t think of a company that has a good business case to buy this. If my M&A team proposed this deal, I’d lose confidence in them.

But, as I said, I hope for the Zoomr kids that they can pull this off.

Sam

OMG, Drew, you are such a jack-ass! LOL. Amazing. Michael gaining 15% of acquisition for promoting the site, truly amazing. I thought only tech guys read this blog? You learn something new everyday.

Isn’t it 5pm there yet?

I still see the countdown stuck on 11 minutes 9 sec. Tried in both IE and FF. Ugh!

The release has been delayed due to DOS attacks. Check their blog.

Looks like the “Web 2.0 Community” turns ugly when their ideas are challenged. I also get the sense that some of the hype is wearing thin.

The countdown may still be stuck on 11m 9sec (is it really a DoS attack?), but at least they’ve got time for beers with their fans. Anyone have any idea when the site will actually relaunch?

I feel sorry that Zooomr’s launch was impacted. I think this demonstrates that sometimes crusty old experience is as important to a project as bright young thing enthusiasm.

I liked Albert Lai’s comment: there is room for competition, and hopefully no one will (or can) patent many of the bits the different sites share.

But the person who ‘outed’ Thomas Hawk, I’ve long thought not giving his full identity impacts negatively on him being an evangelist (!?). But it was up to him to identify himself.

As for who goes to lunch with whom, you know, there is life outside of SillyValley.

DDOS Attack my ass, their site is crap and was build in a couple of weeks.

The hype far exceded their skill and they paid.

They got 11 diggs, but the founders of digg showed up at their party?

What a bunch of lame SF people hanging ou together.

This is not the first time Thomas Hawk has been “outed”. I actually don’t care if people know my real name or not. It’s just that as I have another day job working in the financial services industry in a non tech related field that I’m not allowed to publish things under my real name without having 100% of what I write cleared by a series 24 principal of the firm where I work. This would not be conducive to blogging so I use a pen name. I disclose this on my blog and if I really wanted to hide my true identity I could. Anyone can do a whois search and see my real name.

Thomas Hawk is the only online blogging and tech identity that I use and have used for a number of years.

It’s unfortunate that there seem to be some vicious people out there who want nothing more than to tear others down. We are a small company right now and as such it’s more of a challenge to overcome these sorts of things. But we are committed and will get over this when we can and you will all be able to play with Zooomr. Zooomr already has and will have some super innovative features in the photo sharing space. But more than this we are deeply and passionately committed to continuing to roll out interesting features in the months ahead and to work super hard at building a community that others will want to be a part of.

Scrapping our launch, the attack, the mean spiritedness of some comments are unfortunate. But we will do the best that we can to work around them. Thanks to those who offered support and condolences. I’m sure it’s not the first time that a small company hit a hurdle.

More than technology I am at heart a photographer. What is exciting to me is that we will have an opportunity to develop truly innovative things for photographers and create new and interesting ways to share photos and allow people connect with each other.

Kris and Michael finally got some sleep last night after about four days of straight all nighters. Give us a bit more time and we hope to have this sorted out. And thanks to all those offering supportive words, it means a lot.

“Has Michael Arrington recently had lunch with Andrew Peterson and Om Malik?”

Oh and it doesn’t matter who has lunch with who but in fact I’ve never had lunch with Arrington although I respect him greatly as blogger. I do consider Om a friend and again there’s nothing wrong with this. I’m not quite sure I get the point here.

As for blogging about a field “digital photography” and then taking a job in that space I think it’s ludicrous that you’d object to this. I am deeply passionate about digital photography. I have been for years. And I’ve been very very active in the social networking side of the medium. Zooomr has finally given me an opportunity to quit being the guy who yells at the coach from the stands and to actually get down on the floor and help build and design something that has deep personal meaning and signficance for me. I don’t see the problem there. Many bloggers work for companies and many bloggers blog about the companies that they work for. I’m not going to stop blogging about the photo sharing space just because I’m now part of building it. If you find this so objectionable Dave, feel free to skip my blog. Nobody is forcing you to read it.

Thomas, pointing out how badly this launch has gone, after all the promised hype and recent slams at Flickr, isn’t being vicious. Your group brought much of this on yourselves.

What’s happened is Zooomr has demonstrated that though it may have ‘cool’ features, it has some serious underlying architecture issues, not to mention support problems. I would have thought a better ‘hire’ for the company would have been more technical support, particularly those with experience in supporting a large, multi-use application, than to hire an evangelist.

This has been a demonstration of the worst of web 2.0. That’s not being vicious; that’s pointing out the reality.

You went beyond a 24 hour downtime. For a web applcation, that’s the kiss of death. You _never_ go beyond the 24 hour window.

Sounds like there’s a problem with their build or its deployment. DDOS seems a little too convenient given the neglible user base and limited heat (11 diggs doesn’t even get the script kiddies to put down the DS).

What kind of investor would back or acquire nitwits that hype a launch and then can’t make the deadline? Overpromising, underdelivering. This is like a bad CS group project.

If anyone ponies up more than pocket change for this, I call dibs on this as seven-foot tall canary in coalmine.

Thomas Hawks said “Feel free to skip my blog”

Are you ten? Is this web 5 year old? You purport to be an influencer, you run a blog in a space I am interested in, and you try and be controversial.

As a result you are going to have to deal with what results from your actions. One thing that has been made clear here is that you political / opinion work probably had an impact on zoomer being attacked (If there was an attack, SHOW US SOME PROOF).

The other thing that I think comes out of this is that despite talking to a lot of influential people about blogging I don’t get the feeling that you listened very well to what they said, as you blog is polarizing while many others feel sort of unifying (scoble)

I will continue to read your tripe, just as I read the drudgereport and listen to Limbaugh once and a while, need to know what others are thinking, even if I don’t agree.

Dave

So many critical folks out here but I bet the MOST critical individuals here will still use the service ZooomR offer. I will!

Zooomr proclaims that its main advantage over Flickr is its features. But I’ve yet to come across one feature in Zooomr that I want in Flickr, and I’m come across many occasions where I find Flickr’s implementation of something far better than Zoomrs.

I wouldn’t waste money on something like Zooomr. Why not buy something with users and people give a damn about (except of course TechCrunch).

Advice to Mr. Tate - take one of the offers, and don’t play too much hardball!! Negotiate a little, take the money, and enjoy. Oh, and 3 years from now, don’t let some junior PR monkey call you a “serial entrepreneur” - it’s the kiss of death.

Poor “Thomas Hawk”.

“It’s unfortunate that there seem to be some vicious people out there who want nothing more than to tear others down. ”

He should know, he’s one of them. Ask Tim O’Reilly or Andrew Orlowski - who were both on the end of Hawk’s lunatic stalking campaigns, as Hawk smeared them on every blog he could find.

Zooomr has problems but it shouldn’t have picked a Chief Evangelist famous for his anger management problems.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Your.....le_Graphic

this is bullshit. nice try, mike. once again, I ain’t biting.

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