Official Zooomr Blog

I simply love TagAssist; it’s just so handy! How could it get any better? Why, add US and World States, of course!

Yes, that’s right, TagAssist now supports both US and World State (ISO 3166-1) 2-letter codes. Try CA (Canada & California), WA (Washington State), NY (New York), US (United States), DE (Germany & Delaware), or JP (Japan)

It’s really quick and a lot of fun too. Now back to working on Zooomr 2

Kristopher Tate

Yes, it’s all true — There is a Zooomr 2.0 and over the next week-and-a-half, I will be rolling it out for everyone. Zooomr 2 will include new features and will be better hosted. The first new innovation of Zooomr 2 is already here and it’s something I’ve cooked-up in the last two days. What is it and what does it do? Well, I can first tell you that it’s one of a kind.

Introducing “Inspector”

Inspector is a hover-window that allows you to edit, view, and change photo metadata from all photo index pages. It’s as simple as clicking the Inspector Button () inside of each photos’s ProTip™ zone.

Inspector is even transparent and dragable — Key information such as how many people are inside of the photo and included Zooomrtations are all available from Inspector. Be sure to try it out on my photo catalogue. Here’s a screenshot of Inspector in action:

Roll Out Goodies

What should you expect from me in the not-so-distant future? Here’s a list of awesome goodies that I’m working on bringing you:

• Avatars
• At least two more locales
• Even more Flickr API Support
• LightMap 2
• Sets & SmartSets
• Streamr 2
• TeamTag

There are a host of other goodies that are smaller than this list that I think will make your experience at Zooomr a blast — sorry to make everyone wait, but that’s part of the deal.

Enjoy Inspector!

Thanks,

Kristopher Tate

[UPDATE] I’m looking into reports that Inspector kills Firefox 1.0.7 — If you are running anything below Firefox 1.5, I HIGHLY recommend you to upgrade. You can download 1.5 from either Google or Mozilla directly.

Hey everyone, good stuff to talk about today. As I briefly announced at SFWIN last week, Zooomr now supports the Flickr API.

What does this mean?

This means that all of the thousands of libraries and applications available for flickr can be used with Zooomr with just a few quick modifications. Here’s what’s required:

Changing the following URL endpoints to their new endpoints on Zooomr:

http://flickr.com to http://beta.zooomr.com

/services/auth to /auth
/services/upload to /bluenote/api/upload
/services/rest to /bluenote/api/rest

Some Caveats

Yes, there are some caveats so-far to Zooomr picking-up the Flickr API. First is that it is not 100% complete. For the most part, only upload and photo look-up services are available. Here is a list of all working methods:

Auth

• flickr.auth.checkToken
• flickr.auth.getFrob
• flickr.auth.getFullToken
• flickr.auth.getToken

contacts

• flickr.contacts.getPublicList

people

• flickr.people.getUploadStatus

photos

• flickr.photos.addTags
• flickr.photos.delete
• flickr.photos.getCounts
• flickr.photos.getInfo
• flickr.photos.getPerms
• flickr.photos.getSizes
• flickr.photos.removeTag
• flickr.photos.setTags

photosets

• flickr.photosets.getList

tags

• flickr.tags.getListPhoto

test

• flickr.test.echo

Second, if you would like a key to use the API or have any questions, shoot an email to zooomrapi@bbridgetech.com. I have also recompiled Steve Cohen’s awesome jUploadr upload utility to be used with Zooomr based on the above info. You can pick them up here.

Lastly, There are many new innovations that are well underway that I’m pushing to get out by next month. You’ll see some of them pop-though ever so subtly — but most of it is so new that I can’t just fit it into the old system.

Sorry for the long post, but I just wanted to say that there is a lot going on.

Thanks,

Kristopher Tate

Yes, Zooomr is down at the moment. This is the last week that Zooomr will be down — I’ve been working on getting some outside money for Zooomr and I should be better funded soon. It’s pretty wrenching for me to see Zooomr down.

Anyways, if you want to get a hold of me, sign-up for Meetro and look for me down in the Meetro HQ after you sign-on or talk with me using Google Talk. My Google Account is kris.tate@gmail.com

I absolutely apologize for all of this.

Kristopher Tate

Oh, you should check-out this review of Zooomr done by Thomas Hawk!

I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be attending and demoing Zooomr at the following two events. Please be sure to mark your calendars!

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 — SF Web Innovators Network (SFWIN)

Time: 6p
Place: Microsoft San Francisco (The Landmark at One Market, Suite 200)
Price: $20 if you RSVP; $40 if you do not

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 — The Silicon Valley New Technology April Meetup

Time: 7p
Place: Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ): 2882 Sand Hill Road Suite 150, Menlo Park , CA 94025
Notes: Please click here to RSVP on Meetup.com

I hope to see everyone there!

Thanks,

Kristopher Tate

This is something cool that I have cooked-up to show how awesome geotags are. Just like PeopleTags, TagAssist now can find geotags located near an airport! Currently there are 2940 airports supported between the two major airport codes — ICAO and IATA. This means that when you search for SFO (San Francisco), SJC (San Jose), LAX (Los Angeles), or RJTT (Tokyo), Zooomr will automatically display geotags from the region. Furthermore, if you click on the airport name, a LightMap will open-up to show you all of the photos in that vicinity. Pretty cool, I think.

Additionally, if you are logged in, and you have put an airport inside of your profile, Zooomr will automatically center all new maps in your region.

Lastly, I have added a “Recent” menu that allows users to drill-down to Recent Photos, Recent GeoTags, and Recent Zooomrtations. Be sure to take a look at those.

Let me know what you think of the new goodies!

Thanks,

Kristopher Tate

I just got official word that Zooomr was published in Metrotime again — this time with a full-page spread. And again, here’s the translation with photo of the print:

SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD SHAKES PHOTOSERVICE OUT OF HIS SLEEVE

SAN FRANCISCO: Kristopher Tate has created an online photoservice that
measures up without many problems to established services such as
Flickr. Tate is seventeen and wrote the application in about three
months

“Flickr has some catching up to do” headlines TechCrunch, the online
news and web2.0-gossip channel. Zooomr, the photoservice written by the
american Tate is being described as ‘Flickr on Steroids’. Flickr is a
popular internet-service. You can put your pictures on it, and share and
edit them also. The company has recently been bought by portal Yahoo!.
Flickr touts userfriendliness, but Zooomr is said to have that extra bit
more. Testing it unfortunately didn’t work, because Zooomr was
temporary offline, but is online again now. Its servers had buckled
under the immense attention of the readers of Digg and Slashdot.
Zooomr can be used with accounts of different webcompanies, a reaction
to the fact that after the takeover by Yahoo!, Flickr started pushing
the use of Yahoo! accounts. Other improvements include adding audio to
a picture, tight integration with Google Maps so you can pinpoint where
the picture was taken and which pictures are taken in the vicinity, and
also link pictures with people. Zooomr is fast if the server isn’t
overcharged. The pictures can be blown-up with a simple click. Just
like Flickr, you can keep your album private or just for family or
friends.

And the associated photo:

Okay here’s an update for everyone:

• Talking with different dedicated providers on negotiating the best deal possible.
• Zooomr is still hosted from the same infrastructure.
• Zooomr is much more fast due to the fact that we are now using The Coral CDN to cache static content.
• To date, over 22GBs have been served up in the last 52 hours.

More to come soon.

Thanks,

Kristopher Tate

Oh, hey — Here are a few stats that are pretty cool:

Top 10 Countries

Top 10 Referrers

UPDATE 15.3.2006 22:27: After finally having the chance to check this out myself, it appears that our Google login system works exactly like it should. Perhaps we were mistaken.

I’m not 100% sure, but it seems that Google is temporarily disabling accounts that are using Zooomr. What’s up with that?

It’s much better than the XMPP mechanism I was using awhile back, and I do clearly mark that we are in-fact not a part of Google. It’s just a temporary password — not cool Google.

Maybe you guys should get in-touch with me.

Here’s an article that talks about it.

Thanks,

Kristopher Tate

Zooomr’s Dutch localizer, Kris Vandecruys, caught me in today’s issue of Metro. Here’s what he had to say:

SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD WHIZZKID OUTSMARTS YAHOO’S PHOTOSERVICE

“The 17-year old Kristopher Tate has, in a mere 3 months time, hacked
together a photoservice on steroids. His application offers much better
services than competitors such as Flickr, Yahoo’s Photoservice, and
believes in the Web-2.0 Religion. More to see at 17h00 CET at
metrotime.be“

I tried to stay as close to the original text as possible, hence the
ugly English here and there. The sentence about the religion thing is
really hard to translate directly, the religion thing really isn’t
relevant. Think of it more as a pretty way of saying you’re running a
clean web2.0 app. CET == GMT/UTC+1.

The name of the newspaper is Metro and iirc has some 616,000 readers. Congrats man, you’re Big in
Belgium!

Here’s a photo and its original text. Click it for a bigger size.

Thanks,

Kristopher Tate