I probably broke all manner of protocol posting a comment to the head honcho’s blog, but exactly where else are users supposed to go?

Say what you will about Flickr, they seem to “get” community.

Zooomr very much does have a business plan. But like many small companies we’ve focused the last 6 months or so more on building out our technology and our community.

Certainly like other photo sharing sites we will generate revenue through advertising (we already are actually and have recently begun talks with an advertising powerhouse to work with Zooomr), subscriptions, and the area that we are most excited of all about, something we are calling Marketplace.

Marketplace will be a place on Zooomr where advanced amateur photographers can sell their photos through stock, fine art prints, books, etc. and we will share revenue with our photographers.

Kristopher and I met with a large stock photography company week before last and plan on implementing a stock photography option for our users in the near future. Right now you have the Getty and the Corbis’ of the world that are very exclusive and on the other side you have the microstock businesses that pay very little for a photo. We think that there is a market in between and we think that many of the best amateurs these days are putting out work that is very very close to what the pros are doing.

Because our costs are very, very, low (we don’t have a big staff of people like other photo sharing sites and neither Kristopher or I take a salary from the company) bandwidth and servers is our primary cost. By keeping these costs low and finding ways to partner with our photographers by sharing revenue we think we can be profitable in very short order. Even if our goal *was* simply to be acquired (which it is not, our goal is rather to build the best way to share, search, store, and market your photos online) we certainly would be more valuable by being profitable than not.

Profitibility is very important to Zooomr and equally important, and I say this as a photographer myself, is to build the most kick ass photo playground on the internet.

As a business person I am gettins sick of reading about all of these sites with great features, blah blah blah….. It is hardly all that entrepreneurial to essentially do something that someone else is doing, but adding a few new features, which in turn can be implemented by your market leading competitor. First mover’s advantage does still apply in the online world…. and I’ll be impressed when the first mover finally breaks even.

Zoomr to me seems like a business with one goal… to be aquired.

http://blog.zooomr.com/2006/11.....p-zgroups/

And you are right about our needing to clean up our interface. We are working on this every single day. We will strive to get to the point when Zooomr would be intuitive enough for your parents.

First, i love flickr so much that i actually spent 75$ and bought my PRO account. YES 75$ is what costs me here in argentina, not dollars, pesos, but they are as hard to get for me as it is for you to get one dollar, so for me, Flickr costed 75$, not 25$.

I discovered Zooomr.com some time ago, i browsed it, read about it, found a very stupid login form, and forgot all about it.

Now after this post i am actually using zoomr for a couple of pictures, there is no way i am moving out of flickr, and i will give you the reasons:

First, flickr is about GROUPS, zooomr doesnt have them, so unleast im only in for HOSTING pictures, its not really for me.
Second, flickr’s interface is CLEAN, really, its like the google of image hosting, while zooomr (why the hell three o’s? i always mistype them!) is a very confusing mashup, the menus are hard to understand, the translation is certainly not complete (i use the spanish interface), and the amount of choices you have is overwhelming even for a pro user like me.

I just shiver when i think about my parents trying to use it!, its too hard and unintuitive to use, you will not win traction until you realice this and do a very through interface check, like flock did (and that certainly helped them a lot)

In any case, zooomr has got me with a few of its innovative features, like the photo tracking, for example, i am using zooomr to host my blog logo even tough i have better methods to analyze hits (like hittail.com or google analytics).

Now, stop fighting about this subject, its really silly, flickr will be more mainstream as long as zooomr keeps being as counterintuitive and “dirty” as it is today, plus the social features in flickr are what drives most users.
If zooomr wants to compete with flickr, compete in the field flickr is strong, that is COMMUNITY, there are bigger and better hosting sites arround, like photobucket or imageshack.

Think about it, if joe user wanted to host his picture for a forum, he would just go to photobucket wich has a bulk posting tool.
Now if i want to share a picture i took and get comments, i will go to flickr. Where does zooomr stays this time? Its not good as a hosting site, nor is good as a community site…

And flickr could implement some new features likes SPANISH INTERFACE, or trackbacks, probably improve the forums since they actually suck, but i believe this simplicity is what makes it strong (although adding some WYSIWYG to the textboxes would be nice)

Well thats just my 2c

i ran flickr meetups in toronto for years, and i visited flickr meetups all around the US last year. DSLR use was about 10%, and this is among the hardcore of the hardcore.

i just checked out some figures in the Time Europe article that pegs digital SLR growth as 4% currently, and predicted to go up to 5.5% by 2010.

http://www.time.com/time/europ.....-2,00.html

those are really heavy hitting numbers.

“You will soon begin hitting the 5MB limit even with point and shoots.”

and yet the average internet connection will be only marginally faster and the average screen resolution will be only marginally larger. the bottleneck isn’t the camera, it is that photosharing has an upper limit on the number of pixels it is actually useful to upload and share on the web.

DSLR users also upload more photos per individual than P&S users.

Striatic, you are not going to convince me that digital SLRs are a niche area of the photo sharing market. Try as hard as you want. If it were a niche part of the photosharing market Flickr would’t be teaming up with Nikon and putting free new digital SLRs in the hands of Flickr users in order to build a promotion and marketing campaign.

Go to a Flickr meetup sometime and see what people are shooting with. The are shooting with SLRs.

flickr used to give free pro accounts away too

Yeah and flickr used to charge $59.99 a year for flickr service as well. I still don’t see your point. You yourself note that if they wanted to they could charge users more to offset the higher limits resulting in no financial impact to Yahoo! whatsoever. In fact, for a couple of guys without Yahoo’s deep pockets, you might argue that this impacts us a lot more than it does Flickr.

the overwhelming majority of flickr users, including DSLR users, never hit the cap.

This is because the overwhelming majority of people *think* they are uploading full size originals to Flickr. The files are reduced in size by the flickr bulk uploaders and yet the photo still reads “original” size on flickr. It is not the original size that came out of the camera and if you polled people on flickr and asked them if they thought their original size images were being storred they would tell you yes. It’s a mistake people make when they think that original photos are being saved on flickr and many people make it thinking of flickr as a suitable archive or backup resource.

When you cap file sizes at 5MB and 10MB it will be very hard for users to hit the 2GB limit. Further, image sizes are only getting larger and larger. You will soon begin hitting the 5MB limit even with point and shoots. Rather than see this as a threat, Flickr should see this as an opportunity to better serve their customers.

I’m still blown away that you see digital SLRs as a “niche.” You really should look at some of the sales numbers coming out of Canon and Nikon.

because that list is skewed.

DSLRs have a longer shelf life and there are fewer models than point and shoots.

DSLR users also upload more photos per individual than P&S users.

so the niche is over-represented due to the resulting consolidation. the accurate metric would be to consolidate the cameras producing files under 5mb, and the cameras producing files over 5mb, then count by number of cameras rather than numbers of photos.

“Why have 5MB and 10MB limits in the first place?”

to save on bandwidth costs, obviously. while you guys are still in the “we’re giving everything away for free” stage [flickr used to give free pro accounts away too] flickr is expected to be sustainable. letting people upload and download 50mb RAW files has a heavier cost than the benefit it provides.

essentially, they’d be having a small number of users drive up the costs for the other users by using flickr as a hard drive backup service, which is extremely high impact [with very low benefit].

now look, would i rather flickr increased its bandwidth cap? sure! call it ‘mega-pro’ and charge people in proportion to the space they’re filling. would it make any difference AT ALL for me or the vast majority of flickr users?

no.

i mean, is the ability to upload more than 5mb ANYWHERE on fd’s poll?
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/beta.php .. hm .. can’t seem to find it ..

.. and people complain about the upload cap with extreme rarity in the flickr help forums .. heaven knows they complain about everything else. the reason why you don’t see those complaints very often is because the overwhelming majority of flickr users, including DSLR users, never hit the cap.

Striatic. Really. To saw that Digital SLR owners are a “niche” section of the photosharing market is patently ridiculous. While there are people with small point and shoots where 5MB is not an issue, The 5MB limit is a problem for virtually *every* person who uses an SLR at best photo setting.

Let me point you to this article that references the top 10 cameras used on Flickr (generated by Yahoo Shopping) http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2.....on-flickr/

1. Nikon D50
2. Nikon D70
3. Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
4. Canon EOS 20D
5. Canon EOS 350D Digital
6. Nikon D70s
7. Cybershot
8. Canon Powershot S2 IS
9. Canon EOS Digital Rebel
10. Nikon D200

How can you say that SLR users are a “niche” area for Flickr when they represent such a huge part of what is being uploaded?

You don’t see photos over 5mb and 10mb on Flickr because they won’t allow them. I’m not saying that uploading full high res photos is always the best way to go. But for the people who want that give them choice.

When you say things like SLR owners are a “niche” area when the most popular cameras on Flickr are all SLRs this just makes you look like a biased Flickr apologetic who will say anything possible to try and defend Flickr.

Again, competition is *not* a bad thing. If only a “niche” group on Flickr would benefit from higher file size limits then why does Flickr have them there in the first place? If it nobody were to use higher file size or bandwidth limits then why doesn’t flickr simply increase them? Why have 5MB and 10MB limits in the first place?

Maybe when Flickr started out this was adequate, but SLRs sales are exploding. They are now not only what the top photographers are using, they are what the mainstream is using. To deride SLRs as niche is really a stretch Pal.

do it mention that smugmug offers unlimited storage?

no.

do they mention that this additional upload capacity would only be of any consequence to a very small percentage of digital camera owners?

no.

if this is competition, it is competition for a niche section of the market.

but even then .. if you are a DSLR owner this is sledgehammer to thumbtack for photosharing or even printing.

my point is that unless you have a digital SLR, it is extremely difficult to even create a 5MB photo file in your camera.

my point is that zooomr is a niche service. doubling the upload limit should be put in the context of who it benefits.

it benefits a very specific type of user with a very specific type of camera.

Cmon! because Abby doesn’t have any originals above 600K means she couldn’t upload anything bigger than 5MB on Flickr?

I sense a “not moving out of my position” bias on your part and your comments are reflecting this.

i think that would make a much better headline for this post.

This is not something new Striatic. 50MB has been our limit from the start.

I’ve been impressed with Zooomr and already started porting my pics to it after juploader came. In fact, now I’m adding frills and sharing the pics on my site through zooomr