Official Zooomr Blog

Thanks to John Wesley for building an app to show your Zooomr photos on your Facebook profile page using Zooomr’s RSS. If you want to add Zooomr to your Facebook check it out here.

Photos (l to r from top) by: Sean Davis, Bryan N,jeepersdad and Celine.

Well I’m pleased to announce that Kristopher has just rolled out the latest enhancement to Zooomr, Zipline Quick Reply.

Zipline, Zooomr’s photo and message notification service, continues to be one of the most popular features on Zooomr. Today Kristopher added the ability to quick reply to individual zipline messages. If you find a message that you want to reply to, simply click on the reply button on that message. With this reply the original message and replies will be bumped to the top of the zipline.

Check it out and play with it. It should make it much easy for people to interact on Zipline.

Well I’m pleased to say that Kristopher just IM’d me from Japan and just pushed People Search on Zooomr. With Zooomr People Search you can now search by either email or name to find your friends on Zooomr. This should make it much easier for you to connect to others using Zooomr.

To search for someone on Zooomr just go to this link here.

Look for more enhancements to people search in the near future on Zooomr.

Nice work Kristopher!

Progress in Japan from Kristopher and Vimeo.

Well I’m pleased to announce that Kristopher has been working hard on the continued development of Zooomr and we added two new enhancements to Zooomr this morning.

The first enhancement that we’ve added is Zipline Complete. Zooomr’s Zipline feature is one of the most popular features on the site that allows users to keep in touch with each other through regular status updates as well as photos. With Zipline complete you can now page Zipline indefinitely. You can go back in time for both your own zipline as well as the zipline that you are following of your contacts, friends and family. To get an example of this paging you can check out my zipline or Kristopher’s zipline. This new enhancement for Zooomr is being implemented only for Pro accounts. We appreciate the Pro users so far that have helped financially support the Zooomr Community. Pro accounts are only $19.95 per year which is less than $1.50 per month.

We’ve also added the ability for you to subscribe Zipline RSS for different Zooomr users. You will notice that at the bottom of very user’s zipline is an RSS button where you can get an RSS feed for that user’s Zipline to monitor their status updates and photos more closely.

Kristopher also added a bio page for the Zooomr team which is growing!

We are continuing to work hard to build the best Zooomr that we can and we appreciate all the support from everyone who has contributed to the site.

Well Kristopher has been working like a maniac the past 24 hours and has rolled out a brand new version of Zipline for Zooomr. Zipline is Zooomr’s feature that allows you to follow the photos and activity of your friends and contacts on Zooomr.

With the new version of Zipline you will now be able to see who is a fan of yours vs. a mutual contact. Fans are people who have added you as a friend or contact and are following you on zipline but people that you have not added back as a contact or friend. Mutual contacts are people who you list as friends and contacts and also list you back. If you haven’t already, check out who some of your fans are. I realized that a lot of people that somehow I’d missed making contacts at Zooomr are in there. I’m going to be adding a lot of new contacts in the next 24 hours.

Also there is now a public zipline available. This is a zipline where you can see everyone’s zipline across the entire site. With this feature we’ve also added a new privacy feature where if you so choose you can make ziplines private so that still only your friends, contacts, or friends/contacts will see them. These zipline messages will not appear in the general public zipline.

We’ve also added a new feature where if you upload a single photo, it will include the description to that photo in a zipline.

Kristopher will be following up in the near future with a video update on these new features. In the meantime check out our ziplines to get a sense of what is included in the new version of Zipline. Kristopher’s is here, and mine is here.

There is a post here in Zooomr Groups if you’d like to discuss today’s Zipline enhancements.

Hey Friends, in an effort to improve our groups system on Zooomr, we’ve disabled new comments on the Zooomr Blog in hopes that everyone will use our groups system on Zooomr.

With more of you using Zooomr Groups, we can find and address problems in our website and better serve everyone.

Lots of cool things on the horizon, so stay tuned to the blog, as well — Updates, issues, goodies and status information will always be broadcast here first and also on Zooomr TV.

Please help us make Zooomr better for everyone!

With love,

kristopher

Last night Kristopher rolled out our paid Pro accounts. Pro accounts are $19.95 per year on Zooomr. By upgrading to Pro you help ensure that we can keep Zooomr going, keep developing, and keep innovating in this great new world of online photography. We have a lot of great plans for Zooomr in the weeks and months ahead, but we can’t do it without you the community and we can’t do it without your financial support.

As you all know, Zooomr at the basic level is free. We will always have a free version of Zooomr. We think it’s important that everybody in the world be able to participate regardless of their ability to pay for Zooomr or not. But… we do need to make at least a little money to survive. The community has stepped up and helped us in the most generous of ways and we are hoping that all of you who find Zooomr meaningful will also consider helping us out by turning Pro.

To upgrade to Pro you can go to your main Zooomr welcome page here. (You have to be logged into the site).

Some of you are already Pro and some of you even Pro4Life (we will have these designations back shortly). We do still appreciate any donations that you might want to send our way and have a link on your Zooomr home page if you feel so inclined. To those who have already donated. Thank you. You mean the world to us.

A lot of people ask what the difference between a Pro account and a Free account is. At the basic level Pro accounts won’t see advertisements while free accounts will see advertisements. We haven’t had any ads on Zooomr Mark III yet but will be implementing some in the near future to help pay the bills. By upgrading you assure yourself that when you browse Zooomr that you won’t see these ads.

But more than ads vs. no ads, Kristopher is developing some cool and interesting ways that Pros will be able to access Zooomr. An enhanced version of Discover. Zooomr Analytics where you can much better track the activity on your photostream. And many other cool new features.

We are still working hard on restoring the functionality for a lot of our free services that we had in Zooomr V2. Recent Activity is coming back. As are SmartSets, your favorites, and lots of other stuff — with a lot of improvements as well. But we do need your help to do all of this and we are hoping that you will find Zooomr a worthwhile enough service to help us out.

Well here at Zooomr this morning we were pleased to find a nice review on Zooomr appearing in Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest newspaper. The review gave Zooomr 4.5 stars and we tied for the top rated photo sharing service.

With that in mind we decided to go ahead and launch our Hebrew version of Zooomr today. If you’d like to switch to Hebrew you can do so at the bottom of any page on Zooomr. Thank you very much to Mor Griv who did the Hebrew translation work for us.

Now one thing to keep in mind about translations on Zooomr is that all of them are done by volunteers. It’s you, the community, who choose to spend your time and energy making Zooomr more accessible to various parts of the globe and world. So with this in mind there will undoubtedly be errors in translations from time to time. By releasing beta versions of translations though publicly, it is our hope that the native communities can help us fix any translation errors and make Zooomr a more proper translated site as we go on.

If you’d like to participate and help translate Zooomr into even more languages please see this group here. You can learn more here and here.

With regards to our Hebrew version there are likely some bugs in it. Hebrew is a little more difficult than most translations for us because Hebrew reads right to left and so our templates might be slightly off. Please bear with any imperfections in our Hebrew version and we’ll get it fixed as we can. Please feel free to send any feedback on our Hebrew or other versions to zfeedback@bbridgetech.com. If Hebrew is not working well enough for you you can always switch to another language that might be working better.

Also it’s important for people to note that it is relatively little work for Kristopher to put new translations online. He is not working on translations at the expense of bringing us all back the features from Zooomr 2 that we all are so very much looking forward to. As mentioned, this translation work is being done by you, volunteers in the Zooomr Community. SmartSets, Faves, Recent Activity, Avatars and Profile pages, Uploading Fixes, RSS. Kristopher is working on all of these fixes and a lot more and is doing so very diligently. We are of course only a one developer team though and so this stuff takes some time. But please know that he is working hard. We also plan on many improvements and enhancements to Zipline, Groups, Marketplace and Analytics. All of these great things are coming to Zooomr. It’s just a matter of time.

Thanks again for all of your support! The above photo is of Rabbi Yosef Langer and was taken by me the year before last at a Chanakuh lighting at Union Square in San Francisco.

We are currently experiencing some technical difficulty with our uploading engine so you may have trouble with uploading. Kristopher is working on these problems and we hope to have them resolved and debugged shortly. Will give you an update back when we get it fixed.

Tom

Update: 10:17a.m. Ok guys, I think we have it mostly resolved now. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any uploading problems. If you are experiencing uploading problems still please also let us know what browser and OS you are using.