Zooomr

Zooomr

URL	http://www.zooomr.com/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Photo sharing
Registration	Free
Owner	BlueBridge Technologies Group
Created by	Kristopher Tate

Zooomr is a website created in 2005 by BlueBridge Technologies Group for sharing digital photos.

The site is in continuous development and exited its private beta stage in February 2006. According to Thomas Hawk, the site has well over 50,000 users, who can browse and comment on others' photos as well as upload their own.

History

Zooomr was created by Kristopher Tate, a self-taught programmer.^[1]^[2]

March 11, 2006, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted^[1] an article on Zooomr that termed the photo-sharing site as "Flickr on Steroids," a common phrase^[2] now used in association with Zooomr. This article is best known as the starting date of Zooomr's up-start popularity.

June 19, 2006, Thomas Hawk, a well known San Franciscan photographer and blogger, officially joined Tate to work as Zooomr's "Chief Evangelist."

July 17, 2006, Zooomr released^[3] Zooomr 2. Zooomr 2 features SmartSets, improved geotagging of photos via TagMap, as well as many speed, design and performance enhancements.

August 22, 2006, features such as Notes and Portals were added to Zooomr^[4].

May of 2007, Zooomr launched "Zooomr: Mark III". The site was up for approximately twenty minutes before crashing again due to a severe hardware failure.

June 3, 2007, Zooomr successfully launched "Mark III" with the help of Sun Microsystems and Zoho.

Features

In many ways, the site appears to be modeled after another well-known photo site called Flickr, and while the two services do share a number of so-called Web 2.0 features such as tagging, Ajax, RSS, and GeoTagging, each site offers features the other does not.

Zooomr was added to jUploadr, a Java-based batch photo uploader, on September 11th 2006. Previously users had to upload photos with an online form limited to 10 images.

One feature that sets Zooomr apart from similar sites is multi-login capability, using a service called OpenID. OpenID allows users to register accounts with unaffiliated websites (in particular LiveJournal), and log into Zooomr with that same account without having to type the password a second time. At one time, the site allowed users to log in via XMPP with an account from Google, but these accounts have since been migrated to the OpenID system.

Other features include LightBox (not to be confused with the aforementioned LightMap), which resembles a slide show; Zooomrtations, which allows users to append short audio commentary to individual photos; SmartSets, which are dynamically-generated albums (much like iPhoto's Smart Albums) and PeopleTags, which allows users to add themselves inside of photos, along with searching for people inside of photos.

Recently added features include Notes, Portals, and an improved version of PeopleTags. These three features allow a user to draw boxes over sections of a photo in order to append a portion of text, or point out an individual in the photo, or to link to another photo (much like hotspots in QuickTime VR.

Accounts

Zooomr has no limits on uploading, storing and archiving photos.^[5]

Licensing

Like Flickr, Zooomr enables users to licence their photos in different ways. Though photos default to All Rights Reserved, users may opt to licence their photos under various Creative Commons licencing schemes.

Localization

Zooomr is localized in 16 locales (Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English (UK & US), Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Mongolian, Polish, Portuguese (BR), Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish). Notably, many other websites commonly classified as "Web 2.0" have not embraced localization, distinguishing Zooomr in that regard. Compared with other photo-sharing sites, Zooomr tends to have a higher proportion of photos from countries other than the US.

Criticisms

After the release of Zooomr Mark III, many bugs still exist through out the website. Uptill now, less than 10% of the bugs are fixed although new features are implemeneted. Many users are agitated with the slow development and started to delete their photos from Zooomr. Some users are even more angry for the charging(PRO-features) of 'Social Stream' which supposingly the 'Recent Activity' which was free in Mark II.

Footnotes

References

^ BBC Profile - March 2007
^ ".NET" magazine article - December 2006

External links

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

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