Zooomr

» see zooomr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard the name zooomr was in a tech blog post, probably techcrunch, sometime in 2007. i was on ttnet broadband, a computer engineering undergrad, uploading a small trickle of photos to flickr with a canon 350d. flickr was the default for anyone in my orbit who took pictures. zooomr was the site the aggressive early-adopter photographers on the us west coast said was better. that was the extent of my exposure.

zooomr launched in 2005 from bluebridge technologies group, a small startup co-founded by kristopher tate, a 17 year old developer living in japan at the time, and michael van veen. the pitch was flickr on steroids. the standout feature was geotagging built on top of a service called tagmap, shipped months before flickr added its own map tags. smartsets and portals arrived through 2006 with notes riding alongside. photographer thomas hawk joined as chief evangelist in june 2006 and became the loud voice on the outside pushing the product.

zooomr mark iii was announced in may 2007 with a full redesign. that release was also the moment when the reliability problems started to shape the story more than the features. the site went down often. investor coverage from that window described funding shortfalls and infrastructure that could not keep up. by 2008-2010 flickr had matched most of what zooomr had that was distinctive. the site kept limping. a seventh anniversary redesign shipped in 2012. no visible updates followed after 1 march 2015. the domain sat parked and then in august 2022 it started redirecting to an online gemstone store, which is the state you find it in today.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the teenager angle ~

kristopher tate was the story as much as the product. he was 17 when zooomr launched and had already moved himself to japan for the project. that made him a small cult figure in the web 2.0 wave that also produced the odeo-to-twitter and the digg founders. tate is still around, later co-founded connectfree corporation in tokyo, and works on network protocols. the founder is fine. the product ran out of the runway a teenage cto could keep pushing on his own.

~ what flickr caught up on ~

flickr's yahoo-owned team shipped map tags in august 2006 after buying geobloggers technology. tags and machine tags followed. by 2008 the distinctive zooomr feature set had a flickr equivalent for anyone who wanted it, running on infrastructure that stayed online. the honest technical assessment of the era, from thomas hawk's own blog posts, was that shipping features first is not enough if the site is unreachable half the time.

~ the long fade ~

zooomr's death is not a specific announcement. there is no shutdown post, no farewell page, no press release. the site simply stopped changing in 2012 and stopped serving reliably by 2015. this is the pattern for a lot of second-place web 2.0 photo sites of the era, panoramio being the exception because google closed it cleanly. zooomr faded into a domain that finally got repurposed for something else entirely.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »