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August 21, 2006

Zooomr launches zoomable picture in picture feature

Marshall Kirkpatrick

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Photosharing upstart Zooomr launched a number of new features today, the most notable one called Portals. It’s a means of linking zoomable pictures inside of each other. It’s quite striking, as you can see from the video below.

Zooomr also released annotation features today that include the ability to leave notes on images that are color coded by friend status and people notes, or notes that display Zooomr usernames of people hovered over.

The way the Portals work is that just like text notes can be added to photos, Portals lets image publishers tie photos together with boxes that appear when the image is hovered over. Viewers can pan around inside the embedded picture or click to view the picture itself.

Publishers can use Portals to give their images depth and detail. There’s no limit to the number of Portals that can be put in a single image and one Portal image can lead to another. Thus shots from a distance can have multiple close ups folded in; something that could be great for architecture, nature and group photos.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 11:11 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. David Catalano

    August 21st, 2006 at 11:59 am

    It’s in many ways similar to what Microsoft Labs is doing with Photosynth–although a bit less sophisticated.

  2. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 21st, 2006 at 12:01 pm

    David, I had a similar thought but they are pretty different. Here’s that post for those interested http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....hotosynth/

  3. Florian Cervenka

    August 21st, 2006 at 12:16 pm

    Annotations are fun. The only problem with them is that a very low number of people actually use a function like that.

  4. Kingsley Joseph

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:01 pm

    I can see myself building unsophisticated games or walk throughs with this feature.

    Mike, how good’s their API?

  5. Raj

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:18 pm

    I love the “webcam” tool they use for demo’ing the feature. Anyone know what program they’re using?

  6. Rob Abbott

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:33 pm

    Definitely similar to MS Labs, as already stated. This would be great for trips. I wonder what this would be like if applied to shots of the the Great Wall.

    It will take some traction for annotations to make this sort of paradigm common. I know Yahoo Maps is working on adding annotations.

    I’d like to see more companies putting them into practice.

  7. Zoom This

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:43 pm

    The Zooomr promotion on TechCrunch continues. Does anybody really care about these features besides the geekiest .0001% of the Internet population? Is there no other startup out there that has something interesting that we would actually care to read about?

    Zooomr is trying to out-geek Flickr when Flickr overall has a fairly small marketshare. The bottom line is that most people want to share photos, they don’t want to use features that have little practical use.

    But I must admit that I just love how the portals “pulsate.” I hereby declare pulsating features the hallmark of Web 3.0 and announce that Zooomr is the first Web 3.0 startup. Valuation: $4 billion.

    It’s pretty obvious that Zooomr and TechCrunch have some sort of special relationship. Does TechCrunch have an equity stake in Zooomr or get paid a consulting fee?

  8. Jay Adair

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:48 pm

    I have to agree, it looks like a gimick that nobody is going to use. The annotations on Flickr are quite useful at times, but this is perhaps going a step to far. Good as an experiment, but in reality nobody’s going to use it, I suspect.

  9. Raj

    August 21st, 2006 at 1:55 pm

    I doubt that any of their users are screaming for the portal feature, but it is cool. It’s along the lines of what Microsoft hoped to do with WinFS for local files — be able to relate one object to another easily.

    Different Raj from above btw

  10. justaguy

    August 21st, 2006 at 2:44 pm

    This is a semi-clever feature, but is there a company in there anywhere?

  11. mahalie

    August 21st, 2006 at 3:54 pm

    I have to agree with the last few posts. It’s a really cool ‘trick’ and I would love it if Flickr had it - maybe they are trying to get hired at Yahoo/Flickr?? Otherwise, this alone wouldn’t tempt me in the slightest from using Zoomr instead of Flickr. Flickr has user base, people are invested.

    I think too many similar services/apps actually do a disservice to community-fed apps by their very existence - it splinters the community, divides attention spans. I mean normal people aren’t going to sign up for every service. If I was an all-powerful internet dictator I would force photobucket, snapfish etc to close and have any worthwhile (are there any?!) features not already present in Flickr added.

  12. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 21st, 2006 at 3:58 pm

    Mahalie, that plan is insane.

  13. striatic

    August 21st, 2006 at 4:40 pm

    back when flickr first introduced notes, this was one of the very first “improvements” suggested as feed back from users.

    probably the single thing that makes flickr powerful is its low cognitive overhead. you can do things like this in flickr already using notes and links, but the service never ’suggests’ you do, because that suggestion adds another layer of cognitive overhead when posting a photos. in short, this is one more geeky thing to confuse a non-geek upon encountering the service.

    this is bad for non-geeks, but also for geeks .. because having non-geeks around to play with can make a place much more fun for the geeks.

    this feature not only creates additional cognitive overhead on the site, but off site as well. to create any of the things we see in the demo, you have to be thinking about “portaling” WHILE you’re shooting.

    so many things about this make me want to smack my forehead and scream “what are you thinking!” almost as much as zooomr’s marketing tactic of following most every post linking to http://neologies.blogspot.com/.....gging.html and commenting with “here, have a free zooomr account” .. i’m thinking “who wants to join a photo sharing community where the community core is a bunch of wannabe Michael Arringtons?” no offense to Mister Arrington, but one would think that photographers and playful artistic sorts would make a better community core than would folks who play at ‘find links on techcrunch’.

    finally, if you were to take a poll of what flickr’s most annoying feature is, it’d probably be notes. there’s a big chunk of people who just really find boxes on photos extremely annoying. don’t ask me why, since i’m not one of them, but it is true. why zooomr is going down that particular road is simply bewildering to me.

    *smacks forehead thrice*

    this all just seems like yet another startup learning all the technical lessons of “web 2.0″ but none of the social/community ones.

  14. me

    August 21st, 2006 at 4:59 pm

    Zoomthis,

    If you had a young boy ass like him, you would be on the front page too!

    Biatch!

  15. striatic

    August 21st, 2006 at 5:15 pm

    one last thing. regarding:

    “It’s pretty obvious that Zooomr and TechCrunch have some sort of special relationship. Does TechCrunch have an equity stake in Zooomr or get paid a consulting fee?”

    techcrunch discloses other “special relationships” when they blog about companies they are associated with… i don’t see what possible benefit they could get by hiding a relationship with zooomr.

    more likely, zooomr releases the sort of features that make for interesting techcrunch posts, and unsurprisingly techcruch takes them up on the offer. that’s hardly collusion, just that each is playing the other’s game very well.

  16. El Guapo

    August 21st, 2006 at 5:22 pm

    Zooomr is JOKE until they offer a way to upload more than 5 photos at a time with a LAME web form. LAME.

  17. Don Owen

    August 21st, 2006 at 5:25 pm

    I have to agree with the tone of sarcasm here. If I hear about one more promotion regarding this sad excuse for a photo sharing service im gonna hurl my iced coffee.

    I have yet to understand why this site and its ‘less than innovative’ brand get so much attention by the crunch staffer(s). First off, can you please spend a weekend to get your site to work in internet explorer? I know how anti-m$ the whole movement is but dont you think it would help to support the 70% market share browser?

    Secondly, I know it’s probably a little too late now but you have done absolutely nothing innovative with your site. The geo-functionality on zoomer is absolutely useless and your site is starting to look more like a geek sandbox every day. And can you please host images on a provider who has decent bandwidth? I can’t even sit through a page loading.

    Have you defined a market other than flickr account holders? It looks at though the owner of this site has tried diligently to elevate this ‘kid’ and his pet project to some level of fame and notoriety with no success. I think the idea is to see what influence techcrunch has on the ordinary citizen which doesn’t look like much more than a few refers.

    I can’t wait to see zooooomer in the deadpool one day. 

    Cheers! Don

  18. JamesM

    August 21st, 2006 at 6:23 pm

    How much money was dump into this P.O.S again?

  19. El Guapo

    August 21st, 2006 at 6:54 pm

    I like idiotic features like “Click to view this photo in a lightbox!!”

    As if I knew or cared wtf a lightbox is, this guy is just showing off that he knew how to code something called a “lightbox” in Javascript + DHTML (lets not use the “A” word, it is SOOOO 2005).

    Here’s an idea - instead of F’ing around with your stupid “lightbox”, let me upload more than 5 pictures at a time using your lame ass web form. Is this zoomer’s way of controlling bandwidth? I have thousands of pictures and I sure ain’t gonna sit here uploading them 5 at a time.

  20. Pasco

    August 21st, 2006 at 7:10 pm

    This looks like a hacked attempt at PhotoSynth which would be okay I guess if the rest of the service was actually usable. Hey why not concentrate on that first? Seems like that should be a TechCrunch credo no?

  21. Robert Dewey

    August 21st, 2006 at 8:37 pm

    Why is it that the SAME random (and anonymous) people come out only when there is a Zooomr post? Seriously, half of these people are probably the same person…

  22. ZooomCrunch

    August 21st, 2006 at 10:06 pm

    Yes Robert that must be it. Look at the anonymous people who put their names and/or websites in their posts. Or perhaps the reality is that TechCrunch is obviously for some reason pumping Zooomr? Maybe ZooomCrunch is in order. 1 or 2 posts on a company is fine. With Zooomr it seems like everytime they sneeze TechCrunch is writing it up. As noted these features have little appeal to the mainstream. Technology for technology’s sake. And they’re not innovative at all…they’re duplicating features other people have already developed. Why add this crap when users are pointing out significant limitations of the most basic features? If there are no other deserving startups to be reviewed by TechCrunch and this is the best of the Web 2.0 news then we’re in big trouble. I’m not a fan of Zooomr (Flickr meets my needs just fine) but don’t have anything against them. What’s hurting them is TechCrunch’s constant pumping. I read about them the first few times. If I wanted to use them I would have. I don’t need to be reminded of them on a constant basis. If I were Zooomr I would ask TechCrunch to tone it down a bit.

  23. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 21st, 2006 at 10:12 pm

    “If I were Zooomr I would ask TechCrunch to tone it down a bit.” that’s too funny. point taken etc.

  24. striatic

    August 21st, 2006 at 10:48 pm

    zooomr reminds me of the early soviet manned space program, shooting for technical firsts without really building sustainable development towards their intended goal.

    flickr reminds me of the american manned space program, reaching their intended goal and then kind of just being “the best” for a long time without really accomplishing much.

    in both cases, i hope those similarities stop being apt, and soon.

    i’ve got nothing against zooomr personally, i’m just tired of smacking my forehead every time i read something about them. i’d like a viable flickr alternative as much as anyone, probably more so.

  25. TechCruncher2

    August 21st, 2006 at 11:04 pm

    Fair go - this is pretty cool feature regardless. I laugh at some of the posts you morons put up regarding “Flickr is all mighty”. Zooomr is a great photo app and its competition to Flickr and competition is good.

    I’m just sitting here waiting for Flickr to come out with half as many innovative features as Zooomr, or indeed copy them all and then all you criticising schmucks will just go “wow, Flickr is just so innovative” - its pure crap.

    I love Flickr don’t get me wrong, but Zooomr is also equally as cool and has some amazing features on its site. So why don’t you stop criticising both Techcrunch and your childish ‘conspiracy’ theories and just accept that Zooomr is a great photo app. I don’t see you complaining about half the others out there that have copied Flickr - so stop putting Zooomr down and quit your whinging.

  26. ZooomCrunch

    August 21st, 2006 at 11:32 pm

    TechCruncher2: people aren’t putting Zoomr down as much as they are putting TechCrunch down. TechCrunch gained a reputation for providing good reviews of Web 2.0 startups. It’s obvious that for whatever reason Zooomr is getting an unusual amount of coverage from TechCrunch when there must be other startups doing interesting things that haven’t been covered at all. Zooomr is doing some interesting things. I personally don’t think these things have mainstream appeal and it looks like a lot of people agree. Nobody is saying competition is bad and nobody said that Flick is just so innovative. What people are saying is that Zooomr seems to be openly going after the Flickr userbase when Flickr has a fairly low share of the market to begin with. Bottom line is that this stuff is not newsworthy and there’s no reason to keep writing about every new Zooomr feature esp. when it’s not going to be useful to most people or be compelling enough to change the marketplace.

  27. Sohil

    August 22nd, 2006 at 6:10 am

    For people who want a bulk uploader. It’s currently in a Private Beta and it’s pretty cool and works with no major bugs.

    It will be out.

  28. Thomas Hawk

    August 22nd, 2006 at 8:01 am

    A couple of things about Zooomr.

    Kristopher is rolling out new features very, very rapidly, more rapidly than probably any other photo sharing site out there right now. TechCrunch covers features in the Web 2.0 space. I am sure that as other photosharing sites launch their new features TechCrunch will cover them as well. Webshots, Photobucket, Flickr, as these companies roll out features TechCrunch continues to document them. We just happen to be releasing features very quickly these days.

    Maybe these features are photogeek features and don’t appeal to people like Striatic. Different strokes for different folks. I like them a lot and our users are using them.

    We obviously tell TechCrunch when we launch features as we tell plenty of other blogs and news sources. Like CNET, who also covered this feature as well: http://news.com.com/2061-12572_3-6108175.html

    And we will continue to talk to people as we roll out more features — and we have a heck of a lot more that we will roll out even in the next 30 days. My own advice to someone who wants more coverage is to innovate more and release more cool and interesting things for your users.

    In terms of the comments about Zooomr not having a bulk uploader. We actually do have one coming through jUploader and it is very very close to being publicly released. It’s been in testing for the past month or so and it works really well. Another big photosharing site even just added jUploader as an official tool in their tools section earlier this month. With jUploader users will be able to easily bulk upload their photos to Zooomr. I’ve already used it to upload over 3,000 photos to Zooomr. It works great and allows you to bulk edit both tags and descriptions, something I can’t do with some of the other bulk uploaders out there today.

    The reason I first got involved with Zooomr was because Kristopher was able to develop my number one requested feature from other photo sharing sites (trackbacks) in less than an hour. I had been moaning on for months and months about how I hated that when my photos were moving outside of a photosharing site that I had zero way to track them. And Kristopher said, oh that *would* be cool and developed it in an hour while we Skype chatted online. *That* was slick to me. And as far as I know we are still the only photo sharing site with trackbacks, a great tool for bloggers especially and one of the most number one requested features out there.

    It is this rapid development of features that I find exciting and invigorating. Maybe we are wrong and users really won’t care about a lot of super cool features as we roll them out, maybe they are too geeky. But right now our growth is very strong in terms of all of the metrics, photos, traffic, new users, etc. Stronger than the other photosharing sites that I personally track. Maybe it’s just that we are new and small and are getting accounts with a lot of earlier adopters right now. Maybe it’s that we are giving free 2.5gb Pro accounts to bloggers to promote our site right now, but we think that people actually like new features and going to continue to improve the site with them — geek sandbox or not. Advanced users will use them. Casual users don’t have to and can still have a good time on Zooomr as well.

    And as to even more really meaty social networking tools. Stay tuned. These too will be rolled out very quickly.

    We are in fact aware of the bug with IE6 and the templating and are working on fixing this. We are in beta and not a perpetual beta so expect to see a bug or two.

    Thanks for those that have joined Zooomr and if you have a specific feature that you’d like to see integrated or that you think would be cool on a photo sharing site, by all means, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.

    Tom

  29. Thomas Hawk

    August 22nd, 2006 at 8:07 am

    By the way, for a great example of how Portals work check out this photo of Robert Scoble. Hover over Scoble’s image for a bit and then click and zooom through. We had a great shoot out at the Golden Gate Bridge last night for his new show that he’s doing for PodTech.

    http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/thomashawk/152967

  30. Navdeep

    August 22nd, 2006 at 11:43 am

    http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/shergill/154018

    How can you guys knock this feature?

  31. striatic

    August 22nd, 2006 at 12:55 pm

    i also find it hilarious that you don’t think i’d be interested in a feature like this, since over a year ago i was playing with a tool for doing exactly this that my pal Fabricio was working on using the Flickr API.

    it is funny that you don’t think i’d be interested in a feature like this on a technical level, since over a year ago i was playing with a tool for doing exactly this that my pal Fabricio was working on using the Flickr API.

    i do like this stuff, it’s just that i love my friends and neighbours being comfy and unconfused and not having to explain each and every feature to them.

    Kristopher is rolling out new features very, very rapidly, more rapidly than probably any other photo sharing site out there right now.

    that is exactly the problem.

    the most impressive thing about flickr’s development wasn’t that they were pumping our features every week in the early going, it is that they completely yanked out half the site’s functionality in mid-stream to give the service more focus. that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough as it should. they sliced out a bunch of niche features and shortly thereafter the site’s popularity skyrocketed.

    pumping out a feature in a weekend because it is easy is feature creep.

  32. Thomas Hawk

    August 22nd, 2006 at 2:13 pm

    Hey Stri. Not sure what’s going on in the first part of your last comment. It looks like you are responding to someone with italics but it seems to be saying the same thing.

    I totally hear what you are saying. And although most in this forum don’t know of course, you and I have gone back and forth on reiterations of this same argument in Central probably half a dozen times at least. You also certainly can attest to my moaning over and over and over again about wanting trackbacks. I suspect that you’d rather not see these added directly through a photo sharing site and rather through other outside development. API toys, greasemonkey scripts, etc.

    This is just something where we are most likely going to disagree. Which is absolutely fine. There is room in the world for more than one style of photo sharing site.

    And I know you do actually love the features. How many times have you mentioned live chat type technology?

    But I don’t necessarily believe that features will restrict casual users or adoption. In fact I think features will drive casual user adoption. We just need to develop the right features that would appeal to these users. We are working on these types of features as well.

    the most impressive thing about flickr’s development wasn’t that they were pumping our features every week in the early going, it is that they completely yanked out half the site’s functionality in mid-stream to give the service more focus. that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough as it should. they sliced out a bunch of niche features and shortly thereafter the site’s popularity skyrocketed.

    And this is good for flickr. But Zooomr is not flickr. Flickr’s a great place. I love it. I spend time there every day as you know. Nobody’s a bigger fan than me. But there is room for a site too with more advanced richer photo sharing features.

    Look at the super cool things you can do with portals. Check out this tour of CNET that Rafe put together: http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/17626@Z01/151669 Or look at this cool detail shot on this beautiful sky in Portugal: http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/brunurb/153942/ Or look, one of our users already has a tour of London up: http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/17727@Z01/153167

    My favorite so far of course is my own where we have used age progression technology to zooom forward into the future to see exactly what Kristopher will look like down the road (just mouse back and forth over the photo): http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/thomashawk/148236

    It’s our hope that we are going to be able to build something that is very feature rich that will still appeal to advanced and casual users alike. I’m not sure the two are mutually exclusive. I think you and I will certainly continue to disagree about this and who knows, maybe you’re right and we too will end up ripping these features out later. But for the time being I’m pretty excited about them.

    What I do find humorous is that had we just released simple plain old easy to understand notes like Flickr, everyone would have complained that we were just copying flickr. But when we improve on notes with interesting innovation and more advanced features we get accused of feature creep. Go figure. And see, even know I’ll probably be somehow accused of attacking flickr when you were the one who brought them up.

  33. Chris

    August 23rd, 2006 at 5:03 am

    The only problem I have with Zooomr is that the login system still isn’t perfect. Signing in to a site is something I don’t like doing. I like it to be logged in when I go back to a site.

    I would have said that the lack of mass uploading was a problem but as it has been noted before, there is one coming soon.

    The feature I would most like to see though is a flickr->zooomr synching. That would be perfect for me. You never know if a site will have a major failure. As it is I’m uploading my photos to my personal site, flickr and zooomr. I see it as a form of backup :)

  34. Markus Merz

    August 24th, 2006 at 6:00 am

    Manual trackback:
    http://performancing.com/node/3990

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