TC seems to think that Zooooooooomr is not enough on its own - it is something developed by _some really young dude_ and therefore is worth going to check out.

i don’t know - i’m a flickr guy, just want someplace to stick my photos, whatever - but if someone said anything about me or the stuff i produced and threw in a “he’s only X years old” disclaimer every time they mentioned my work, i’d start to wonder if what I produced was worth anything at all.

Sure, right over here at the super secret Zooomr MIII test site

I have a Flickr and a Zoomr account, and periodically check back with Zoomr to see if it is still as slow as mollasses and if the experience of using it still brings my browser to a crawl.

Loading a map with every photo might make for an interesting demo, but in practice I’ve found it to be the worst thing about the site. Maybe removing that is one of the 250 features?

For one thing I still respect you - not delete the criticizing comments.

This is a pretty shoddy journalistic justification for such a state of affairs:
“As for what’s up at Zooomr, I wrote this post a week ago, so I promise that we’ve held it until close to or actual launch date. My understanding is that if everything isn’t live yet it shortly will be…”

All I can say is thank heavens this kind of thing doesn’t happen very often with these wonderfully professional tech sites:
http://daringfireball.net/2007/05/enjackass

It happened several times in its short history. So many still have strong faith in it. I wish they’re right.

Doesn’t this have nothing to do innovation or advantage, etc? It is just not real (yet). I hope this whole thing is not some kind of “behavior art”, or I’m caught on candid camera for being too serious.

Anyway I was a Flickr fan but my free account was very limited. Zooomr is more permissive, completely free and gave one of those “Pro4life” accounts just because. They have some catch up to do, specially in the API support department, but I can’t complain.

TravisP: How do you figure he’s marketing himself? Where in God’s planet have you ever seen a GUY (who looks like Kris btw) utilized to market a website effectively? Its not like he has the clout of Bill Gates, where anyone will watch and listen anyway, if thats what your trying to say. Name me one other succesful startup where the owners needed to show their faces so consistently and constantly.

And what, a day later, the zooomr page is still showing a landing page. We can’t access anything, we can’t see any of the new features. These are the things that bother me with Zooomr + Kris.

I don’t mean to be a total jerk, but the truth hurts. Thomas, get your project straightened out. I like the marketplace feature, where you can sell stock photos. This is innovative. But the rest is junk. Stick to your core features and advantages.

Does Zoomr provide a way for their users to export photos to flickr?
http://www.zoto.com does. They’ve redesigned and relaunched their site, too. But I guess because their developers are actually old enough to get into a bar they won’t ever get a mention on techcrunch.

Thomas Hawk is not shady. He’s made a lot of enemies by standing up for photographer’s rights. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Coleman Hines was someone who didn’t like Thomas taking a picture of their building. Or maybe Coleman Hines is in the pay of Flickr. Wouldn’t be surprised.

FYI: I am a Zooomr user. I had a Zooomr account before I had a Flickr account. The only reason I use Flickr, is because of all the cool things you can do with the API. Once Zooomr’s API is released, I don’t see a single reason why I should stay with Flickr.

Flickr recently did what old-school publishers did and censored a photo… Hawk merely pointed out that Zoomr was more like DIGG (ala the CD-KEY scent-trail revolt), and Zoomr would not arbitrarily do things like what Flickr did. It’s a great point and I’m glad he utilized the community of Flickr to make it.

I am a Zooomr user.

I understand what you are saying about Thomas, but I think you are wrong. I have been following Thomas’ work since long before Zooomr came into the picture ;-). He has been a passionate photographer for a long time and passionate about Flickr also. Your comment about drumming up business for himself is not quite accurate either. Every time I have seen a comment from Thomas that appears to have any bias (and I don’t consider criticism of policies etc bias), he clearly identifies that he is the CEO of Zooomr. That is not shady. It allows the reader to decide if they feel that his comments are biased, because he is CEO of Zooomr. If he did not state his interests then yes I agree it would be ‘pretty shady’.

If you take the time to read through some of the discussions that he has been involved in, where it appears that he is criticizing Flickr, you will likely also see a reasonable amount of early members of Flickr with similar views.

@Jono: I don’t see what is wrong with marketing yourself by any means to increase traffic and exposure. Does an entrepreneur not ‘have’ to try and ‘hype’ their product to its maximum to get that exposure?

Zooomr has launched its latest version, Zooomr Mark III today with over 250 additional features, enhancements and upgrades….

Maybe that’s shady. But that doesn’t care for me. What I want is the best service for my needs. And I want high-resolution geotagging, a nice interface and big storage for free. 1 year ago was this “pro-account for blogging about zooomr” campaign. That was pretty cool promotion I think. So it was zooomr I started with - and not flickr.

Its about Thomas Hawk’s questionable (and bordering on the unethical) business practices. Taking advantage of any hot topic / issue within Flickr, (which with 5m users+ is always bound to happen) to put the knife into Flickr and then say “hey I’ve got a photo website too.”

Competition is fine, but using your competitor’s website & forums to actively drum up business, well that’s pretty shady.