Archive for the ‘Zooomr’ Category
Monday, June 4th, 2007
Yesterday it finally arrived, and if you just want to skip to the chase, and find out whether Zooomr really is a photo sharing community at its finest, if this new version lives up to the hype, that’s fine - the answer is yes. Here’s why.
Firstly, if you’re not aware, Zooomr now offers unlimited storage of your photos without any size restrictions for every single user, regardless of whether you’re signed up as a pro user or not (which makes flickr’s free offering look a little feeble by comparison). This was actually introduced back in March to make up for the delay in introducing Mark III, but it’s worth repeating. There really isn’t a catch.
Zooomr already had a great community, but with Zooomr Mark III they’ve taken that a giant step further by really making you feel like you’re a big part of Zooomr. Every time you login to Zooomr you’re presented with a page called ‘Zipline’. If you’re familiar with Twitter then you’ll understand this, it’s basically a timeline of posts, starting with the most recent, of photos people have uploaded (with thumbnails of them), comments they’ve left on their own Zipline (maybe about their photos or asking questions or answering one of their friends), and other things too in the future. It sounds simple, but it works so effectively in getting you hooked in on looking at friend’s photos and seeing if they’ve discovered anything new by someone else. I would expect more and more getting added to this side of the site, it’s a killer social feature, that (against the odds I might add) seems to work very well on a photo site. Unlike Twitter, I can actually see myself using this, you can’t help but get involved, it’s such a fantastic way to keep up with your Zooomr friends, and it’s pretty addictive.
Groups have also been added, something that flickr has had for a long time, and although this side of the site is really only getting started and is still quite difficult to navigate, it shows a lot of promise for getting users involved further in discussing their photography, and sharing photos.
Another thing they’ve done is improve the adding of contacts, friends and family. When you add someone now, that person gets a notice (via Zooomr’s ‘Fanmail’ private messaging) telling them you’ve added them, and asking if they want to add you as a contact too. Previously you only knew if someone had added you as a contact or friend if you happened to spot it on their Profile page. When you add someone you come across, you can decide if you want to hear all about what they’re up to on your Zipline. Things can get pretty busy on there at times, and you might not be interested in everything someone has to say, so this is very handy. You can decide if you want to just keep an eye out for their new photos, if you’re interested in messages they post on their Zipline, any events they might post (a Groups feature that isn’t setup yet), or if you want to keep an eye on their social activity. That last option is still not clear, but I would guess you’d be able to see on your Zipline when a contact has added a favourite or commented on someone’s photo. You can always go back and change these settings later through your profile page, if you change your mind.
You can also quickly see one hundred photos from either everyone on Zooomr, your friends, your contacts, or just you, on the new ‘Discover’ page which gives you 20 photos each of those added in the last hour, last day, last week, last month, and the last year. This is quite a nice tool to see at a glance what’s happening, and one that will hopefully have more options and variations soon (I’d quite like to be able to filter photos to BOTH my friends and contacts for example). As its possible for you to miss some new photos by your contacts as they’ve gone out of the time range that Zipline is covering, there’s still a need for some of the old views in the previous version of Zooomr, so you don’t miss anything.
What else? Searching when geotagging is now much improved (it actually finds locations accurately without much bother, and it will make use of tags to help find landmarks if it can), camera information can be searched against (so you can for example find all photos taken with say, a Canon 5D), smartsets are now even smarter so you can now create automatically updated sets of your photos by camera information too (like this set I created of Canon 5D photos taken by my contacts and I), and lots of other little things that I’ve forgotten.
There’s still a lot coming back online though, some of the features of the old Zooomr haven’t returned just yet (viewing favourites, trackbacks, and photo exif information from pre-Mark II photos, being the most notable), but there’s a lot to really like already about this new version of Zooomr, and a good future ahead too. Kristopher is at the moment still bringing new servers online, but the speed of the site is getting better all the time (the first day or two had been rather slow but today its been mostly great), and I’m looking forward to seeing everything being finished.
The launch of an open API for Zooomr soon should hopefully blow the site wide open for some great applications much as the API for flickr has done. It should also allow for an easy upgrade path if you should choose to move from flickr to Zooomr (hopefully moving your photos and tags for you), but that really depends on flickr providing Zooomr with a commercial api key to do so. Fingers crossed.
During one of the many times during the ustreamed launch of Zooomr Mark III that Thomas was taking questions, I asked him if with this release we’d be seeing the end of these Mark releases full of tons of features, in favour of regular new additions. With it being nine months since the last change to Zooomr (other than the unlimited storage of course in March), and a fair bit of downtime involved in these upgrades, I hoped to hear Zooomr would be swinging the way of regular smaller updates. Lucky for all Zooomr users then that the new architecture of Zooomr should leave things good to go for just that very thing, in fact Thomas hopes that every couple of weeks or so we could be seeing new features or tweaks appearing based on feedback from users and planned additions.
Later in the year one of those features will be the new Marketplace when you’ll be finally able to start selling your photos through Zooomr (and keep 90% of what you charge), so there’s plenty still in store.
Go Zooomr.
Posted in Photography, Zooomr | 4 Comments »
Friday, June 1st, 2007
As mentioned the other day, Zooomr hit some hard times when their database server crashed. Well, now thanks to the combined help and generosity of Zoho (providing space in their data centre instead of the old, and other help), Sun Microsystems (loaning some high powered, high capacity servers), and Dell (who I take it fixed the controller problem on the database server), all the photos on the Zooomr Static server are now back up.
That means all the photos I’ve blogged here from Zooomr are now showing again, and also they now appear very quickly! The new data centre they’re using puts them on a much better fibre link, and that coupled with the Sun hardware hosting these photos seems to have had a dramatic affect.
The Zooomr site itself is still not back up, but that’s expected later today, and judging by things so far it’s going to be much quicker than it otherwise would have been. Very cloud has a silver lining, and it looks as though Zooomr has come out very well from this one.
Posted in Photography, Zooomr | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
I first wrote about Zooomr back in October, having just discovered it as the photo sharing site of choice for my photos. Since then I’ve uploaded a lot of my own photos, as well as favourited and commented on a ton of great photos I’ve come across whilst browsing Zooomr. It’s a site that suits me down to the ground already, the way it has trackback information on visits to my photos, the recent activity bar, the smartsets, and just the general good community there, all added up to a great site.
For the last week and a bit though, Zooomr has been offline whilst migration took place to the brand new version, dubbed Zooomr Mark III. Development on this version has been going on for the last nine months, and Kristopher Tate (Zooomr’s sole developer) has been hyping this release up for some time now. It’s been a rocky path, with the initial launch in March abandoned due to technical difficulties with their storage provider, forcing a rethink and rewrite of certain elements of the new Zooomr. This last week hasn’t been plain sailing either, with the relaunch originally expected to take 12-24 hours, but to say these guys have been honest and transparent about this new release and the problems encountered would be an understatement.
If you doubt how dedicated the people behind Zooomr are to what they’ve created, here’s a quick aside. During most of the downtime whilst Mark III was put in place, Kristopher Tate and Thomas Hawk were live on ustream.tv, so you could watch the upgrade such as it is, as it happened. They could’ve just left it at that as a bit of a novelty, but in the IRC chatroom created on ustream to go with this broadcast, both Kris and Thomas were taking questions on the new release and what’s planned for the future. Whilst Kris was working away, Thomas would be answering question after question, and it really was an ingenius way to launch a new release. The people I’ve encountered there from the Zooomr community have been on the whole a great bunch, and it’s been a good opportunity to ‘talk photography’.
This morning, around the time I should have been ready to head out the door for work, the new Zooomr finally launched. Putting aside the need to be ready to catch a bus, I quickly set about discovering what was new. As it turned out though, I should have been quicker. Although there was a lot of new things there to play with, ten minutes into a new era in Zooomr, the database server died. Of all the rotten luck, the guys behind Zooomr really needed this to go well, and they were dealt another blow.
The upshot of all this is that the new Zooomr is ready, but Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate are currently having to work on repairing or replacing one of their servers before anybody can get at it. That also means the photos I’ve blogged here from Zooomr won’t show up for the timebeing. But with Robert Scoble putting a call out that so far seems to have shown interest from Sun and Zoho, things should with a little bit of luck be not far off Zooomr Mark III, Launch 2.
Posted in Photography, Zooomr | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
A few weeks back I decided to upgrade my digital camera from my trusty Sony DSC-P52 (simple, small, and served me well for a few years) to a Panasonic Lumix FZ50 (not quite a digital SLR, but it’s a lot closer to a ‘proper’ camera).
I’ve been wanting to try my hand at having more control over the photos I take, and this camera appealed to me - it’s a couple of versions newer than the FZ20 my brother owns which seemed a pretty nice camera. Anyway, I won’t bore you too much more on this, suffice to say - I’ve been taking a lot of photos and trying to read up on what all the controls I now find myself with, actually do. Oh, and I’ve been taking my photos in RAW and fiddling with them mainly in the beta of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (pretty nifty).
Why I’m writing this post though is more about where I put the photos I take, once I’m ‘happy’ with them. Obviously, flickr’s the first port of call for most photographers, and as I’ve had an account there for over a year, I put up some of my initials shots from when I was in London last month. Everybody uses flickr right, so why use anything else?
Well, flickr to me seems a little clunky in places - I think as it’s spawned new features it’s maybe become a lot less usable. A case in point, I knew that flickr did Geotagging (marking on a map where you took the photo), but it took me far too long to figure out where I could actually do this. Even once I did, the unfortunate side effect of flickr being owned by Yahoo is that the maps they use are Yahoo’s - the detail in the UK is pathetic at best.
Enter zooomr. I’ve been aware of them for a fair bit of time. Being a regular reader of Scobleizer, and as a result now a keen watcher of some of the ScobleShow, or more specifically the fantastic Photowalking series, I’ve heard quite a lot about it. Anytime I’ve seen links of people’s photos leading back to zooomr, I’ve been taken with how nicely laid out and feature-filled it all looked.
So I signed up the other day, and then the whole site died. This hasn’t softened my enthusiasm for the site though, in fact reading the blog over the last three days as the site came back up, only proved to me that zooomr has been put together with some real dedication by the folks in charge, who seem very passionate about what they’re doing. Besides, this thing is still in beta (along with a heck of a lot of the rest of the Web 2.0 world). So, today when the site was fully available again, I uploaded my first photo - one I took at Edinburgh Zoo last week during some downtime whilst in Edinburgh on business. And what a nice experience it was too. Uploading was simple, geotagging was easy and used Google Maps (I could find the zoo!), and everything just clicked together in a clean, efficient way.
Sea Lion at Edinburgh Zoo Hosted on Zooomr
I have to say, this first experience certainly doesn’t make me want to go running back to flickr - I can see zooomr becoming my main (possibly only) place to upload my photos. Sure my photos won’t look that great, but at least the site they’re on is kind of cool 
. Go read their description of the site’s features and their FAQ, and get started.
A quick disclaimer if I might: I did spend some time this afternoon trying to work out how to sign up to an unrestricted upload Pro account (much like flickr has if you can find it). There’s a link in the My Account section of zooomr that goes nowhere, but a quick Google search eventually showed me that these guys are (at least for now) giving Pro accounts away for free if you blog about them. Was I going to blog about this site anyway? Yes. Did the thought of a free Pro account make me be even nicer about them than I would otherwise have done? No, but it helped. Would I have paid money for a Pro account? Yes, and I will when that day comes (I presume it will eventually). Is this a cunningly excellent move on their part? Absolutely.
Posted in Photography, Zooomr | 6 Comments »
