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by Kristopher Tate | 3 January 2008 | General | No Comments

I have been blocked from “Zooomr Exodus”, a place where about 30 ex-Zooomr users who feel that they are more important than everyone else on our worldwide photo sharing community have chosen to remain.

Lately they have caused quite a lot of commotion on Zooomr, so I wanted to give them a respectful reply on what is going on over here at Zooomr HQ, but they have instead blocked me before I could do just that. I feel that this is in large part very disrespectful to all of the hard work we at Zooomr have put into the community.

Below is the full body reply of the message I was blocked from posting:

Thank-you for all of the time that you have spent writing your replies and also if you’ve ever used Zooomr, thanks for that as well.

I’m still reading through the breadth of these replies, but I wanted present you with what has really been going on.

5 months ago, Zoho wrote to us that they weren’t going to be able to host Zooomr in 2008. This is not their fault, as they have been very courteous to me and our community.

With the bandwidth and costs that it takes to run a site like Zooomr, we started to look for options to keep the community alive.

Because of the similarities between Flickr and Zooomr, we had already been looking for ways in 2006 to differentiate: Zipline was one of these, and unfortunately with the slow launch of Mark III, we weren’t able to get it out before the Twitter phenomenon took off.

Though, because of the standing similarities of Zooomr and Flickr, investors would not invest in our community inside of the states — this is why I am here in Japan — to save Zooomr. It has nothing to do with a “Fascination” with Japan. This is about saving Zooomr for everyone.

In order to appease Japanese investors, a mobile version had to be built. This is what we had been working on for the past 3 months. Lately, all attention has shifted back to Web because that’s where our roots are.

Thankfully, because I’m now here in Japan, we will be able to move Zooomr and make sure that its community will be able to stay alive.

To those who continue to bully me and our users, I’m glad flickr exists for you. Yet, to not take in account of the hard work that I give our users on Zooomr from all of the business to programming work (and every little thing in between) is simply absurd and shameful.

I’m sorry that Zooomr had to take a brief detour to save everything we’ve had up until now, though 2008 will be an even stronger year for Zooomr and its community — on Web and on Mobile alike.

There is no alternate motive but to serve our users as well as we can. Obviously, we are a business as well and must make money to survive for the better of the community.

Japan has given us the security that we so needed. Some respect to our Japanese investment board and Japanese employees would be nice.

Either way, we’re in the midst of our move to Japan. We will continue to fight for our users. This is the oath that I took when I decided to build the first photo sharing website for the entire world.

After the data move, we will activate Zooomr 2008 and you can see the breadth of my hard work then.

Life is a handful of delight and sorrow — You learn that with every bit of sorrow, there remains a bit of delight.

kristopher

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