DISQUS

dbcohen · 2 years ago

Absolutely Scoble, I wish I had lots of extra dough because I'd dump it into Zooomr.

McBLG · 2 years ago

Amen.

Bess · 2 years ago

Alright. What kind of help does Zooomr need? There are database mapping tools that you can convert one databse to another type of databse for migration and database upgrade.

This is a database admin or database architect's job.

dbcohen · 2 years ago

They don't need help migrating, they need machines to run the db

Tom Newman · 2 years ago

After all the hard work Kris and Thomas have put into this they need help. Zooomr Mark III launched at 2315 tonight (May 28) but went down 20 minutes later because of a server failure. What we saw when it was up was great and everyone wants to help see Zooomr continue.

Chris Nixon · 2 years ago

I would certainly look kindly on a company that thelped the guys out. Looking for plus points with "the kids"? Give the guys a hand.

Thomas Hawk · 2 years ago

Thanks Robert. We really are trying hard. It was so exciting to see people in the site playing with it. The first new photos being uploaded, people putting upldates on the Zipline. The first groups being started.

We are not giving up yet though. We do need help but we are damn committed to getting back online. Kristopher is headed back down to the datacenter in Sunnyvale as I write this to try and get us back online with the resources that we have.

Thanks to everyone who has showed us such amazing support over the past 7 days.

http://blog.zooomr.com/2007/05/29/zooomr-the-li...

Chris Pirillo · 2 years ago

Gimme a sec...

Brett Nordquist · 2 years ago

One item to note: Anyone can make a Paypal donation off the link on the Zooomr homepage. I'm sure every little bit helps right now.

Jim · 2 years ago

Switching a code base and systems from one operating system to another isnt trivial and if you go the whole hog and utilise MS langauges it's essentially a rewrite.

Wouldn't it be better for DELL or HP to come along and supply the hardware, which is what they need, and show how thier kit saved the day. This is a hardware issue and not a software issue.

monk.e.boy · 2 years ago

I expect most tech entrepreneurs go through similar steps:

1. Discover computers early.
2. Fiddle with computers.
3. Start coding at home. HTML, javascript, BASIC
4. Make simple web site. Need apache.
5. More complex web site. Need MySQL.
6. Finish school.
7. Start Uni. (where very machine is UNIX or Linux)
8. Start start-up.

I find it hard to imagine anyone choosing to pay for Windows software after that. For 90% of entrepreneurs the GUI that you use to configure your server cluster is insignificant.

The only cool thing MS make is Visual Studio + .NET.

monk.e.boy

paul · 2 years ago

Kristopher says he needs Hardware - does that mean a rack of servers?

Chris · 2 years ago

1 word. Storage Area Network. OK, 3 words.

"And, even, get one to switch from LAMP to Windows or something else. Anyone in?"

Google is running Linux. GOOGLE. There is nothing wrong with clustering Apache or using Linux SAN. There could be something wrong with the developer infrastructure or funding.

http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/348...
"All machines run on a stripped-down Linux kernel. The distribution is Red Hat (Quote), but Hoelzle said Google doesn't use much of the distro."

LVM + SAN kills anything Microsoft has. I know I have an MSDN pro subscription and I can DEV ENV any MS software my heart desires.

Remember the problems myspace had on the bluedragon .NET servers and MSSQL? They had to spend millions to fix that. If poor zooomr switches to that solution he will not have the backup to do it.

Chris · 2 years ago

As for switching them as an evangelism opportunity, I would say that's a bad idea because even if MS goes and fixes everything, they will be creating a support dependent that may not have the money that newscorp or intermix had to resolve issues.

Then MS will be stuck and zooomr will be stuck in a money issue with future issues.

Scoble's company is using high volume LAMP with Ubuntu just fine and a heavy volume of video traffic, so it really is about the developer. I am running a social networking website off of a cable modem in our offices with Red Hat Linux, which is amazing because it still gets 40k hits per day. The 100kbps bandwidth limitation hardly shows. It's about the software.

Jon · 2 years ago

Hang in there Thomas and Kristopher! Great shout out Robert - fingers crossed someone is listening and acting.

Alejandro · 2 years ago

"There are very few opportunities to change the decisions of a startup in terms of the infrastructure that has been chosen."

No, Hotmail downgraded from FreeBSD at some other time.

Chris · 2 years ago

@1

I think Scoble did wrong here. VC and investors never want to invest in something that is broken or seems problematic.

They are in it to make money for themselves.

Scoble should have:
downplayed or not even mentioned these problems; waited for the servers to come back up, at least to the point of giving the appearance of functioning well; waited until the Alexa stats were at a peak for the website;

THEN blogged about how they needed funding, NOT REVEALING that they are a 1 developer operation. At that point Kristopher would have gotten requests for a business plan and would have had a real shot at quality capital.

I think Scoble pretty much destroyed that for now.

Chris · 2 years ago

"I think Scoble did wrong here. VC and investors never want to invest in something that is broken or seems problematic."

Unless they are to buy it out for a fraction of the real worth, to compensate for the fix-it-up costs.

Shelley · 2 years ago

So this is Web 3.0 -- we're all supposed to pitch in so that a startup can survive long enough to be bought for millions?

Every time something has happened with Flickr in the last year, Thomas Hawk has been among the first to trash the site, mentioning about Zooomr at the same time.

He and Kristopher still continue to hype this site as 'the' photo sharing service, when they can't even get their _new_ servers up and running.

They disdain using AWS as _too slow_ yet SmugMug has been able to use it successfully for its workings.

They haven't once apologized to their customers. Instead, they do this lame "think they can" post.

I'm sure someone will step in to save them, because people like you promote it. Not all the other startups, of course. Just the 'approved' ones.

And will the people who step in to save the site be thanked in the end when it is sold? Unlikely.

DaveE · 2 years ago

Any Zooomr users out there who want this adventure to continue should dig into their pockets and donate what they can via the link on the zooomr.com front page. Even a few dollars would suffice. Donations may just provide Kristopher and Thomas with enough wiggle-room to get Zooomr up and running again.

We know the software works, we've seen it working. They need the hardware now.

DaveE · 2 years ago

Hey Shelley. We've already been thanked many many times for our support. Why are you so bitter?

Chris · 2 years ago

it sounds like you're asking if anyone wants to help Zooomr recover? Sign me up. I don't have the cash to fly over there or make a major difference through donation, but I'm more than happy to donate some time and effort. I'm an infrastructure engineer/solutions design/systems integration guy in Canada. Drop me a line if you guys need some help in planning upgrade, roadmap or just another body to bounce ideas off of.

Michael Buckbee · 2 years ago

I haven't read anything about them "disdaining using AWS", but that was my immediate first thought.

AWS isn't perfect, but in the vast majority of cases is likely to be better (cost + uptime + choose your metric) than trying to roll your own.

Gregor J. Rothfuss · 2 years ago

The difference between this hype cycle and the last one ca 2000 is that startups now no longer need to fork over millions to Sun for hardware and Oracle for software. Why in the world would you want to return to that world? It just dilutes your equity with no upside.

The hand-waving you are suggesting is not gonna change those numbers. And the kind of performance problems people are seeing can't be solved just by running the installer for SQL Server either. The kind of architectural advice you need you can instead get for free from Danga, makers of LiveJournal:

http://danga.com/words/

Chris · 2 years ago

I disagree on the point of AWS.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchT...

Scoble's sponsor Seagate has 750GB drives at 240 USD. The bandwidth at most datacenters is way cheaper than AWS. AWS keeps charging cyclically for investment overhead.
Also RCP through WSDL is slow, as the user first has to upload to the server you're ALREADY paying for, thus you have to absorb THAT bandwith, and then once the picture data is in memory, you have to absorb the bandwidth to send it via RPC to Amazon's server via WSDL descriptors as an object. Then you have to absorb the bandwidth to get it back if there is any further processing.

By using AWS you could be jumping your bandwidth costs by 3 fold at least. The scalability can be mimed with any SAN built from cheap seagate drives and open source software.

AWS is a loser in my opinion because the RPC doubles and triples bandwidth. Go with an intranet solution such as LVM and SAN. Wayyyyy cheaper and just as stable.

Shelley · 2 years ago

Doesn't matter what should be used or not. We have no idea why the 'database server crashed'. For all we know, its due to how the application was developed and has nothing to with hardware.

All of these options pre-suppose that Kristopher knows enough about server architectures, database engines, scaling, and optimization to take advantage of any solution. Frankly, this is demonstrating that he's a 19 year old with little true computing experience and big ideas. This isn't unusual. What is, is how seriously this was taken by folks who frankly should know better.

Now, rather than _anyone_ admit to making a mistake related to Zooomr--the creators, or the pushers--a plea goes out to, "Please, won't someone help save the startup!"

This is sad across the board. I would feel sorry for Kristopher if he hadn't brought so much of this on himself.

I hope the site does recover. I equally hope that the company learns to place more emphasis in good computing techniques and less into hype.

Shelley · 2 years ago

Sorry, first its should be it's.

Guy · 2 years ago

@monk.e boy
Acutally, microsoft provided everyone within the computing department of my uni (Bristol UWE U.K) with a complete and full set of licenses for everything you could imagine, i clocked over 10 grands worth of apps, productivity software and more flavours of operating systems you can throw a stick at.

Chris · 2 years ago

"I hope the site does recover."

Web based computing is not rocket science, neither is div modifying Ajax code. I have zero doubt that the site will recover and continue operations in the very near future considering that he was able to code the site in the first place and set up the initial servers.

"Frankly, this is demonstrating that he’s a 19 year old with little true computing experience and big ideas."

If you look at a couple other 19 year olds in similar situations, like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you find that they actually had a lot of technical help, rather than journalistic help. I think that it was key to their success. As good as I am, and as much hardware as we have, I know I wouldn't be able to function without other people here. I know it's not the same as a web portfolio, but it's similar none the less.
I hope zooomr gets purchased by Google for a reasonable amount and he gets to retire early. They could integrate it into Picasa ...or something.

Doug K. · 2 years ago

I find it interesting that they offer unlimited storage but can't even keep one database online. If doesn't make me confident that they could safely store my photos. Maybe it would be a good lesson for their future endeavors to let this fail.

Podesta · 2 years ago

I am with Shelley, again. Brave gal, she, to come out and tell the truth among all this hype. What the continuing manipulation from Kristopher and Thomas does confirm is that Zooomr is not ready for prime time. I would caution people NOT to invest money in it. I think you will just end up out of pocket with an endless array of excuses as your reward. If the effort were remotely properly planned, we would not be seeing what we are seeing now. If you have extra money laying around donate it to needy kids, not middle-class youths with grandiose ideas.

Joseph · 2 years ago

Well... instead of donating to them, perhaps someone can buy shares of their company with money for servers... that way, if/when they sell for millions, perhaps that can benefit the person "donating" as well. A good investment opportunity?

Though Scoble has an interesting point about this being a great PR opportunity for a company like Microsoft, RedHat, Novell, Sun, etc. to "help" in exchange for a nice bit of PR and the side benefit of some possible vendor lock in).

steve · 2 years ago

@20.

S3 does require two hops on upload, but the stored files can be sourced directly to the consumer via Virtual Hosting Buckets. Amazon recognizes this and charges only ten cents a gigabyte for uploading and between eighteen and thirteen cents a gigabyte for download. S3 costs fifteen cents a gigabyte per month for storage. Pretty competitive pricing considering there is no minimum usage requirements.

The alternative for a startup is to build out a server farm. Even if the "rolling your own" was cheaper from a hardware, software, and bandwidth perspective, you have to take into account the hidden cost of having your key asset (namely your development team) doing low value IT tasks.

Trevor Carpenter · 2 years ago

I think Scoble wasn't recommending MS. I think he was more or less commenting on the potential for any large tech company to reach out and lift a fellow tech company out of the quicksand.

Way to go Scoble. Just writing this post creates conversation.

You could have said, "Yahoo should send a few Flickr coders down to help." And that would have kept the converstation going.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Shelley: they have one database server. It costs $25,000. It is nearing the end of its life.

The problem with all this stuff is that you can be a brilliant developer, build an awesome system, but if you don't have funding you really can't deal with scale issues that the Internet brings. It's one thing to build little utilities that sit on your desktop. It's a whole nother thing to build a system that'll support 100,000 people at one time. And this new version would attract a decent level of growth, too, cause it has a ton of features that the competition doesn't yet have. Flickr, for instance, isn't yet localized to Asian countries -- Zooomr was getting popular in Japan and other Asian countries because of that.

Starting a business is a LOT more than just writing PHP or C++ code and putting it up. Even if that code is brilliant it won't go anywhere if you don't have the infrastructure behind it.

-gary · 2 years ago

This is an even better opportunity for Sun to drive over a few of their new Opeteron servers they're pushing so hard and help lock Zooomr into LAMP, than for MS to try and switch them. Even if MS gave them $10MM worth of free software, it would be worthless without the hardware.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

#22: I'm sorry, I don't agree with people who say that I should misrepresent or "spin" the facts. Sugar coating this won't bring the servers up. Kristopher is in a deep hole and it's not one that he'll dig out of alone.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Gary: you're right. They need hardware, not software.

LayZ · 2 years ago

@41 If he wasn't recommending MS then why did he say it? Understand his point, but Chris is correct @19. This would create more problems than it would solve, for both Zoomer and MS (or any other large tech company). MS (or any other large tech company) would likely not make their investment back anytime soon. Unless Zoomr is some sort of charity, then there is very little motivation for MS (or any other large tech company) to help. Because there is likely little potential for this company to grow to the size that makes it worthwhile for the large tech company. It's also a miniscule PR opportunity for MS as Zoomr barely shows up on anyone's radar outside the circle-jerking echo chamber to be of any long term benefit to MS (or any other large tech company).

Shelley · 2 years ago

"Why are you so bitter?"

I missed this one -- must have been in moderation.

If someone kills my cat, I would be bitter at the person. Do not assign an emotional context because I am pushing the bubble you want to breath from.

Robert, what about the customers for Zooomr? They put trust into this company, into a site that has been extending the functionality, without worrying about having the infrastructure in place to support it. And now, supposedly something has crashed, Kristopher films himself throwing his hands up in the air and saying he needs more money. Not a word, not one, of apologies to the people who have linked their photos at Zooomr, or uploaded their photos to the site, and now have dead air to show for it.

Flickr wasn't always owned by Yahoo. Yet I don't remember Flickr ever doing such to its customers. I never once remember them begging people for server money while the site sat idle.

Yet here is Thomas Hawk, leading the vanguard to tar and feather Flickr every time the company makes even a minor mistake.

I'm cutting about the same level of slack to Zooomr that Mr. Hawk has cut to Flickr.

If you all want to throw money at this site, hey! Go for it! I can think of other charities that could use the money in more meaningful ways, but its your bucks.

"Starting a business is a LOT more than just writing PHP or C++ code and putting it up. Even if that code is brilliant it won’t go anywhere if you don’t have the infrastructure behind it."

Don't forget that the system was working, albeit with problems, before this new "Mach III". And that perhaps having the systems in place before rolling out new features is the intelligent, responsible thing to do.

Don't talk to me about 'brilliant' code or 'brilliant' developers, Robert, when you have no idea if it is or isn't. You are not a coder.

A brilliant developer doesn't spend time talking about the choo choo that can, when they're system is down, and their customers are left hanging in the wind.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Microsoft has 1200 evangelists around the world and the resources to buy some hardware to bootstrap a little startup. So does Sun. So does Google.

Come to think of it Google should swoop in and buy Zooomr just to get Kristopher and have him join the Picasa team.

Shelley · 2 years ago

Sorry for the typos. Need comment editing features.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Shelley: I've been online over on the UStream broadcast with Kristopher and Thomas and they've been saying sorry plenty. Kristopher feels very bad about not being able to get Zooomr up.

Thomas also continually praises Flickr and we even had Flickr's community manager on our show.

Shelley · 2 years ago

Then they need to come out, in Hawk's blog and the Zooomr front site and tell people that the site is down until further notice. That there was a hardware failure, and there are no backup servers in place.

Pure and simple -- let people know this isn't going away in an hour or two.

Not on UStream, not via some cute Web 2.0 way. In writing, across the front page, with details of what happened, what the plan is going forward, what's happened to the data, and a big huge apology to everyone involved.

Question: are the static servers for the photos still running? Or are they taken out because of the Raid failure? And is it a raid controller failure, or a server failure? What exactly failed, and how?

And what type of machine has failed? Was last week's machine failure the same as the most recent? I'm hearing controller and database machine. These are not the same thing. Has everything died?

Shelley · 2 years ago

Sorry again with typos, should be RAID.

Shelley · 2 years ago

As for Flickr, I tuned into the Hawk show on the front page of Zooomr yesterday for all of five minutes. In that time, while complimenting other aspects of Flickr, Hawk managed to get in one dig against Flickr because it wouldn't accept trackbacks. That was just watching five minutes.

It's called a backhanded compliment. Most of us could do without them.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Shelley: I am trying to find out all the details. When I talked with Kristopher last night he said that their database server was down and he couldn't get to it. I'm not sure what that means. The hard drives are near the end of their life expectancy. They were hoping to get funding by now to replace hardware and that hasn't happened.

Shelley · 2 years ago

Hard drives near their life expectancy -- Robert, Zooomr has only been in business less than a year.

Shelley · 2 years ago

PS Zooomr is an Arrigton darling. I think Techcrunch should step in and provide support, don't you?

philip tadros · 2 years ago

right now we are paying close to a grand for our rackspace servers and we are still in development, kris - wendell, if you guys want to use what we are not using set up whatever firewalls etc.. i don't know i'm just tossing it out early, please go for it, i remember 2 years ago almost when wendell ask me if i could pitch in some loot to zooomr, i wanted too' but never did - email me if you think i can help, phil@metroproper.com

bigluck!

Brett Nordquist · 2 years ago

Robert, maybe your sponsor, Seagate, can kick in some support?

Chris · 2 years ago

@40

"S3 does require two hops on upload, but the stored files can be sourced directly to the consumer via Virtual Hosting Buckets. Amazon recognizes this and charges only ten cents a gigabyte for uploading and between eighteen and thirteen cents a gigabyte for download."

You don't get it. The datacenter STILL charges you for the RPC or remote proceedure call datatransfer regardless of what Amazon thinks or feels or tells you. You are still burning money.
If I was going to burn money that way instead of using a SAN, I would simply set it on fire and make a video claiming that I'm SO RICH, I can simply set money on fire.

"Come to think of it Google should swoop in and buy Zooomr just to get Kristopher and have him join the Picasa team."

Bandwagon. see end of @36

"They were hoping to get funding by now to replace hardware and that hasn’t happened."

If they give me half(49%) of the stock in the company I will ship them a 10TB of seagate drives from TigerDirect USA and the machines to host them. The SAN software is free and FOSS.

Kristopher can email me. I'll put sitespaces.net back in the canix.ca datacenter in Montreal and integrate the 2 with some of the other SN sites.

I will also promote the site on our network. I wonder if they really are as Scoble describes?

I think this drama is amusing, but again it's not really helping at all. I will help for stock. Not for free or for charity. They're trying to make money after all.

Thomas Hawk · 2 years ago

Shelley, you can attack me all you want. You've done plenty of it in the past and fortunately for me most people are aware of your reputation. It's ironic though to hear you of all people talk about "tar and feathering." I think you once wrote a post calling me the world's worst evangelist. Very cool Shelley. You are "snarky," congrats on that.

As for Flickr, I have been far, far, more involved in that community than you could ever hope. I've interacted on that site in fact more than 100 times the amount that you have. Yes Shelley, more than 100 times more than you I've been involved in the Flickr Community.

And as someone who is actively involved in a community I have a lot of opinions about it. Some opinions are critical and many others are positive. That's how communities work.

Was I critical when Flickr recently censored on of Flickr's most popular members when her work was being ripped off? Sure. Flickr admitted this was a mistake. Was I critical when Flickr censored my own work? Yeah, sure there too. Imagine that. I don't like being censored. Since I started the first Uncensored group on Flickr months before ever joining Zooomr (not that you'd know this because Flickr is not really a place that you hang out) I'm not sure really why this should surprise you.

Was I critical originally when Flickr denied Zooomr an API key in order build an importer to allow people portability of *their* photographs? Yeah, I was. I believe in portability of data. And I believed in portability of data well before I got involved in Zooomr.

But have all my opinions been negative? I've written plenty of positive things about Flickr. I've written posts on the top 10 hacks for Flickr highlighting great apps built with their API, I've written posts about how to get attention on Flickr (even featured on the Flickr blog). I've written headlines like "Flickr's New Geotagging, Pretty Damn Impressive." I've praised their new sets of sets technology.

But you wouldn't know any of these things Shelley because you are not a part of the same community on Flickr that I am.

You know what Shelley. When I posted an image to my stream complaining about censorship at Flickr recently I had 134 people fave that photo and 234 people leave comments on it. I guess I struck a nerve that resonated - but in your world that's not allowed.

We are building Zooomr to do things that are not being done at Flickr today. To open the world of stock photography to photographers everywhere. To build new ways that you can interact with your friends through things like Discover and Zipline. Things that Flickr is not doing Shelly. But that fact that we are working hard building something cool doesn't mean that I still can't be critical of Flickr when they do things that I disagree with. That's what being a passionate member of a community (something which you are not at Flickr) is all about.

As for apologizing for Zooomr's recent failure? Yeah. We've actually done so many times. But you wouldn't know that because you haven't been hanging out with the Zooomr community. Scoble actually has been much of this week.

But if you need to hear it here to -- I doubt you even have an account on Zooomr -- then I'm sorry Shelley. There you go.

By the way, I'll leave you with a post that I recently penned about the top 10 ways that Flickr is great. Funny that you don't seem to see the positive things that I see in Flickr -- that you only focus on the negative. But I suppose that's just your personality and how you see your world.

Top 10 Things that make Flickr great, by Thomas Hawk.

"1. The Organizer. This is perhaps the most impressive thing about flickr of all. This is a piece of pure programming genius. I'm not sure exactly who should get the most responsibility for building this, I'm sure flickr would say it's all the team, but whoever has the most responsibility over this at Flickr. Hats off to you, really, batch operations, edits, groups, sets, all of it is terribly impressive.

2. The open API. In my opinion some of the best things about flickr happen outside of Flickr, I wrote a post about the top 10 flickr hacks post once but standout apps include Flickrleech, Smartsetr, Scout, and a whole host of greasemonkey hacks.

3. Stewart Butterfield. Stewart is more engaged than any other major community leader of a major site like this. He could be off counting his money and hanging out at the beach but he hangs around and engages the community on an ongoing basis.

4. Recent activity page. It's like crack. You all know it. It flows extremely well.

5. Communication on Service issues. Whenver Flickr goes down or needs to be taken offline there is always an even extra level of communication with the user base. Always has been from day one.

6. Sets and collections. At first I thought collections was no big deal. I tried them out but didn't think I'd ever use them. I was wrong. They make a ton of sense and are great. I think Eric is responsible for a lot of the work that went into collections.

7. Yahoo's search capabilities for image search. Although we are only beginning to see this (recently Yahoo began placing landmark photos on their search pages from Flickr) longer term allowing Yahoo search access to Flickr photos will allow much more exposure to our photography through Yahoo. In what can only be described as a symbiotic relationship, Yahoo will also benefit from having smarter and more relevant search. Although Flickr has been slow to get this all going, in the end this will be a very positive thing. The search team bought Flickr at Yahoo not the Photos team.

8. Interestingness. Organizing photos around social activity to determine relevance produces far superior image search technology to any alogorithmic model that we've ever seen.

9. Design. I think George Oates is a big part of why this has been so successful. Flickr's overall design is elegant and sexy. I've often described Flickr as a sort of museum where the site doesn't get in the way of the art.

10. Finally the community. Flickr is a community of interesting passionate artistic people. It also has some of the most irreverant and fun people I've ever had the pleasure to have known. If for no other reason than I met Mr. Chalk through Flickr, the people on Flickr make it what it is."

Chris · 2 years ago

Thomas, on your blog you say you're good friends with Scoble. Why doesn't he just finance it and add it to his Podtech networks site?

That would seem like the obvious thing to me.

paul · 2 years ago

Kristopher is a Flash developer, why hasen't anyone called Adobe?

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Chris: if you think I have the money to finance Zooomr then it's obvious you haven't yet hacked into my bank accounts!

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Paul #63: Zooomr was written in C++ and PHP. Not sure what you mean by that?

Chris · 2 years ago

@64

http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2006/03/15/p...

You're the VP right?
You may personally not have a lot, neither do I really, but as a senior exec with that kind of gross to dispose of, you could easily do it. More easily than 90% of your readers that's for sure.

That's like saying Ballmer couldn't buy aQuantative because he can't personally afford it.

If you are so hard up to help them than do it, and expand your enterprise at the same time. Don't tell others to "believe it", if you don't.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Chris: just because I have a VP in my title doesn't mean I'm rich or have disposable income at my discretion.

As to PodTech, we have a board of directors, and a CEO, and business goals of our own and it isn't possible to just free up resources the way you seem to think is possible.

Not Shelley · 2 years ago

>> "But if you need to hear it here to — I doubt you even have an account on Zooomr — then I’m sorry Shelley. There you go."

Very, um, gracious. But why not something on your blog or the Zooomr blog, directed at your users? I think that's what she meant.

It might have happened IRC at some point and if a user happened to be logged in at that moment, they might have caught it. But most wouldn't. A little *responsibility* goes a long way.

Thomas Hawk · 2 years ago

If it makes you feel better not Shelly here you go:

http://blog.zooomr.com/2007/05/30/working-on-ge...

Many of our users have been hanging out live with us as we've been dealing with our outage. Have you been not Shelly? Shelly listened in for five minutes apparently and took offense because while complementing Flickr I was critical that they didn't have trackbacks. If Shelly was really a part of the Flickr community in any meaningful way she'd know that I've been critical of Flickr not having trackbacks way, way, before I ever joined Zooomr. In fact I'm somewhat notorious for my opinion on trackbacks on Zooomr.

Personally I want to know where my photos are showing up out there on the internet and this is data that Flickr collects but refuses to share with their users today. I can't even put my own sitemeter on my flickr account and pay for my stats myself.

Maybe stick around for more than 5 minutes next time Shelly before you decide to bash something that you don't really know anything about.

Garth · 2 years ago

The reality here is that Thomas Hawk is an opinionated blogger with a full time job in finance. He has taken the title of CEO at Zooomr and mostly does “evangelism”, Kristopher is a software developer who also is in charge of the network, database and servers. They just don’t have enough hardware or experience running a business and upgrading complex software applications.

They have picked a niche that no one else really wants right now, because the international market is worth little to advertisers currently.

The amount of time that have been down each time they try and roll out new software is an embarrassment, the lack of backup servers or effective planning show that this is not much of a business.

Plentyoffish has 3 servers and one developer and has never gone down for weeks at a time with far more traffic. That story is far more interesting, and the business is real. The difference is he did not make friends with Hawk and Scoble to write about how hard he tries.

Karoli · 2 years ago

Shelly, many times I agree with what you write but this time I think you're dead wrong. Hardware fails. Most of the time it can be replaced quickly, but when you're running on a shoestring with an unexpected withdrawal of what funds you had a month ahead of a major launch, it's difficult.

If you look at the video Kristopher did, it seems clear that it's a hardware failure, pure and simple. It was probably risky to try and revive that drive after it failed last week, but when money is tight you do what you have to.

I view any investment in Zooomr as recoverable, given that part of the new features are the ability to market my photos. As much as I love Flickr (and I do), I don't see that as a viable opportunity to market photos with the kind of freedom and autonomy that Zooomr will offer.

I remember when Digg crashed for a couple of days before it got big-time funding -- and that crash was purely scaling, not hardware. Had Digg not been funded, it would be in the dead zone today. No matter how you feel about Digg and its community, it is the undeniable poster site for a successful Web 2.0 startup from nothing to something. Kevin Rose may not be worth 60 Million or whatever was reported, but he's surely better off today than he was in 2005 when struggling to keep from bending under the load.

As a Zooomr 'customer' (but really user -- customers actually have to PAY for what I've gotten free), I don't need apologies from anyone at Zooomr. What I WANT is for them to succeed, and if it takes a contribution from me to do it, they have it.

Chris · 2 years ago

I know you have to pass a resolution to make an acquisition, but come on....

If this is as sweet of a deal as you make it out to be, you should be beating the others on the board away with a stick to keep them from ripping up the resolution with their bic pens while frantically signing on.

Johnb · 2 years ago

Nice post Scoble.
For me Zooomr is one of the best social photo-sharing sites on the web.

Please consider making a donation.
http://beta.zooomr.com/

Shelley · 2 years ago

Thomas, I'm not attacking you -- I'm attacking a crappy way of running a business. As for you "Not in the same Flickr group ("...If Shelly was really a part of the Flickr community in any meaningful way..."), not in the Zooomr group, doesn't matter: it's a crappy way of running a business.

Where is your note in the front page of Zooomr? The damn site is down. It's down for the count. This should be the most prominant piece of information on the front of the site!

"You're watching Kristopher Tate working live" "You're watching Thomas Hawk have a beer", you guys act like your rock stars. It's creepy.

If you have to depend on your clients forgiving you everything because you're tagging yourself for a ride on the starry eyed express, well, good for you. But it doesn't make up for the fact that you're throwing new stuff at machines, and for all intents and purposes, don't really seem like you have any idea what you're doing.

At a minimum, if you were having so many problems with your servers, why on earth would you think it wise to double or more the server load by adding 250+ new features!?

Karoli, if you want to jump into the Zooomr experience and send them money and support, that's cool. But it's still a lousy way to run a web application.

However, I won't fill Robert Scoble's comments with my unwarranted negativity and attacks on poor Thomas, poor Zooomr. I'll take it to my space.

Karoli · 2 years ago

Shelly,

I converge with you on one point: It is certainly not the usual way of doing business. Whether or not it's crappy, I'm not sure. The conventional way is certainly the more accepted. Yet, I'm sure they didn't write the original launch script this way. Perhaps it's my ADHD-ness or something, but I don't necessarily hold the same criticisms of how this has been done, because I can see myself in their position doing the same thing. I do cringe on their behalf. I remember all too well the year that my hard drive died on October 14th, the day before a major IRS filing deadline, and getting a new drive in and backups restored took me until 4:00 on the 15th.

My clients were forgiving, up to a point, but I knew I'd better be delivering in the future on a much more reliable basis if I expected to keep them. Even now I cringe at the memory of it. It certainly appeared to them that I didn't know what I was doing, but the fact is that my only mistake was placing too much reliance on one piece of hardware -- a mistake I've not made since.

Perhaps I'm inclined to be supportive of others in parallel positions. Maybe I'm just a cheerleader for underdogs. But whatever I am, I don't see these folks as people who don't know what they're doing.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Shelley: personally I agree with you. I’d never have started a company without proper funding and without a team in place that could keep up with the scale. But, that’s sort of why I love Zooomr. It’s something that shouldn’t exist. There are going to be dozens of companies that’ll fall down over the next 24 months. Advertising will prove incapable of funding many of these little sites that have popped up lately.
I want to believe in Zooomr because it’s a dream. Something that shouldn’t exist. You shouldn’t be able to start a media property with very little capital.
But, back to the question, they didn’t know they were going to have so many problems. You can only plan for all eventualities if you have capital. Money. To buy multiple servers.
It’s pretty clear right now that Zooomr isn’t being run by a totally professional team. Both Thomas and Kristopher will admit such. They were playing chicken. They were hoping to get their new service up and running so they could attract investors.
Investors were never going to invest in the old Zooomr. Why not? No business model. <strike>Heck, Flickr STILL doesn’t have a business model and that’s two years after Yahoo purchased it</strike> (I forgot that Flickr sells "pro" accounts).
Think about that one for a minute.
But the new Zooomr did have a business model. Most of those new features? They were to let photographers sell their photos. THAT is a business model. One that investors would be interested in.
So, they created lemons. OK. But rubbing their faces in the lemons won’t help make lemonaide.
That requires some sugar.
Who has some?

-gary · 2 years ago

while I don't agree with Shelley's tact or even general attitude, s/he does make a point.

I've been keeping up with the progress over the last week, and find it difficult to get any indication of what's going on. I go to the site and nothing is there. I can't listen in on the chat while at work, so I try to catch up when at home. Last night I watched "launch, launch, launch" roll past my screen for what seemed like 5 minutes with no hint of an expected launch time. I gave up and shut down. A bit more communication for those of us that can't dedicate the whole day to keeping up with the chat would've been nice. A little late to ask for now. Then again maybe not, given the current circumstances.

I can't fault Zooomr for something I know nothing about, but it seems that this was an upgrade that could've, or should've, been done in steps. This isn't just talking out of my ass either. I know what it's like to run a live service since I do so myself.

For what it's worth, if I was in SF I would've drove over the spare server I have last night.

Chris · 2 years ago

"So, they created lemons. OK. But rubbing their faces in the lemons won’t help make lemonaide.

That requires some sugar.

Who has some?"

It doesn't make any logical sense, but boy does it sound good.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Chris: sugar, er, money, solves a variety of sins.

Remember, eBay was down for two days. Then they hired a good CTO and they haven't been down since and everyone forgot about their own "week of hell."

Garth · 2 years ago

Most active flickr users pay $20 a year to use the site, that seems like a valid model to me.

If this was the first time this happened it would be a different issue, but this has happened each time they add new features, with the length of the outage increasing each time.

Personally I don't see putting up live video streaming of them screwing around and drinking wine with ice as increasing confidence in their service or skills.

Initially I thought putting up the live streaming while they made the transition was kind of interesting, though I wondered why it would take so long to deploy the new site.

Karoli · 2 years ago

About three years ago the community website I work for underwent a major upgrade and platform migration on their message boards. We worked like dogs for a month ahead of the rollout building, testing, fixing, testing, etc. Our one developer put in 80-hour work weeks (and this isn't a little startup).

Launch day comes, and at midnight the servers roll to the new platform. We QA, everything looks wonderful, it's just singing. So we open the doors to the public and within 30 minutes everything. slowed. to. a. crawl.

Roll back, evaluate, figure out that one of the load balancers wasn't configured properly, roll out again, only to have the same result. And then weirdness in the database.

We rolled back and it took another month of troubleshooting and reconfiguration to get it working and do the 'official' rollout. Those days were some of the most painful (and longest) of my life...and I had time and a little creativity invested, not the kind of sweat that's been put into this.

We took those lessons learned and made the next upgrade much more bulletproof. I'm sure that will be the case here. Looks like Twitter has had many of the same lessons.

syawa · 2 years ago

robert,

how about ask zoomr migrate their storage and everything to Amazon S3, EC2 and etc. less headed. why chris keep complaining about downtime. learn from smugmug ...

Zoli Erdos · 2 years ago

Garth, c'mon, wine and ice???? What a crime!
:-)

Shelley · 2 years ago

Garth, "...wine with ice..."--that in itself is enough not to trust them with money.

Seriously, sorry for my attitude, Gary. But no, I don't feel tactful today. Sometimes one feels like one has to yell to get through the muffling of the pom poms.

I wrote about this Robert, but I didn't want to add a link in the comments--look like I'm tooting my own horn. As for the lemonaide, I think a good place to start is take down those silly video things on the front page, and write a note for the system users about what's happened, in detail, and the plan for recovery. That's the _right_ thing to do.

Trevor Carpenter · 2 years ago

Is there a way for me to filter out all comments by Shelly?

We will survive! Long live the ZooomrNation!

Shelley · 2 years ago

Not a problem, Trevor, I'll filter myself. I'm sure your enthusiasm is all that's needed in order to make the server work.

Perhaps if you clap your hands and shout out, "I do believe in Zooomr! I do, I do! I do believe in Zooomr!"

Shelley · 2 years ago

Sorry Trevor, I'm going to offend you and comment once more.

Robert: "It’s pretty clear right now that Zooomr isn’t being run by a totally professional team. Both Thomas and Kristopher will admit such. They were playing chicken. They were hoping to get their new service up and running so they could attract investors."

I knew that Robert. Does the Zooomr community know their photos and data were going to be put to such risk?

It would have been a simple matter to implement the new features on a spare laptop as demonstrations for VCs in order to get investor money. Without having to risk the entire site. This was grandstanding, from two people who, yes, really don't know what they're doing.

"Investors were never going to invest in the old Zooomr. Why not? No business model. Heck, Flickr STILL doesn’t have a business model and that’s two years after Yahoo purchased it. Think about that one for a minute."

In other words, Zooomr wasn't interesting enough to generate funds, for all of the talk over at Arrington's on investors salivating to put money into the site. Well, I can believe that. A business model would have been for them to mock up the new Mach III site, put together a dynamic presentation for the money people, and shopped the site around. This way, they wouldn't have risked their believer's data and photos.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

>Does the Zooomr community know their photos and data were going to be put to such risk?

The photos are backed up. The controlling server is down so the photos are unavailable.

There's always risks in storing data of that data going away. I'd hope that people would realize that, but they probably don't.

Ben · 2 years ago

Do you know the documentary called e-Dreams? It's listed on imdb. Your mentioning of documenting everything on video made me think of it.. except that I expect zooomr to survive- mostly because it doesn't seem like vain ambition, and because there probably won't be a second doc com burst. Things'll pick up soon. I hope. Thomas and/or Kris: if you're reading, keep up the good hard work!

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

To be fair to Kristopher, they do have some investors interested but the process has taken a lot longer than they were expecting.

seshadri · 2 years ago

"To be fair to Kristopher, they do have some investors interested but the process has taken a lot longer than they were expecting"

I am surpised they didn't have a 'plan-B'.

Karoli · 2 years ago

I have no worries about my photos for a number of reasons, Shelley. (And I apologize profusely for misspelling your first name...I have a friend who spells it without the 'e' and habit took over). Even if a site were sponsored by God himself, I wouldn't place my trust in any of them without backups, which I have in abundance. Beyond that, there's no indication that anything has happened to my photos or data. They're stored on a server that will be back up and running shortly. But even if their backups fail (knock on wood), I've got them on two separate external drives and a DVD backup, so it's not a big deal.

The Zooomr blog is the place where the 'right thing' is. I don't really care what's on their front page at this point -- there's a full explanation and apology on the blog.

I disagree with your conclusion that Zooomr wasn't interesting enough. to generate funds. I think, however, that to generate the funds, it had to have a viable, working business model because the space is crowded. Yahoo just shut down Yahoo! photos and opened pathways for migration to Flickr or Shutterfly, so what VC would make an investment without seeing with his/her own eyes what makes this particular site stand out? I can understand that.

Because Zooomr's model is so closely integrated with community, I'm not sure that static mockups would have sold it.

I think the points you bring up are valid ones and should be raised. I'm just not as inclined to write them off for the negatives yet. Although I admit that I handed out some jabs for the wine on ice thing....

Eric Costello · 2 years ago

Scoble says: "Heck, Flickr STILL doesn’t have a business model and that’s two years after Yahoo purchased it. Think about that one for a minute."

Thinking...

OK, got it! Scoble does not know what he is talking about!

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Seshadri: if you've been following Zooomr over the past week you'll see that this situation is far past a "plan B." Nearly everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.

You can't always plan for every problem, especially when you don't have the resources.

They are continuing to work the problem, though, and I'll let you know when the situation changes.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Eric: fair enough. I forgot about Flickr's "pro" accounts. But if that's really returning a huge return on investment I'd be very surprised.

Chris · 2 years ago

@96,

That's the problem with not doing fact checking and speculative journalism.

“Heck, Flickr STILL doesn’t have a business model and that’s two years after Yahoo purchased it. Think about that one for a minute.”

Had this been posted in a newspaper or magazine of any size, Flickr would have a serious legal complaint and rightly so. That's an opinion, but it's Scoble's website so it changes the context of the comment. Glad he made the correction.

AndyC · 2 years ago

I'm with Shelley on this one. Rather than worrying about whether a tech company should donate a hardware or software solution, perhaps the call should go out for someone to donate a solid and sustainable business model instead...

seshadri · 2 years ago

"if you’ve been following Zooomr over the past week you’ll see that this situation is far past a “plan B.” "

yes. I haven't been following too closely. But i still don't think my plan-b question has been addressed.

So are you saying even *if* they suddenly somehow get a huge amount of money *now* their problems will not be solved?
if you don't answer 'yes' then i am correct in assuming that they didn't have a plan-b about the funding.

BTW, i am not a zooomr user. I visited their website - nowhere it mentions about the outage???

VxJasonxV · 2 years ago

seshadri:
Click "blog" on the bottom of the page.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Seshadri: I'm in contact with them and their server problems might be solved WITHOUT getting funding. So, they are definitely working on "Plan B." Funding just would make the solution simpler and more sustainable long term (they still need a good database administrator etc).

Karoli · 2 years ago

Actually, if we're going to be picky about facts, Flickr's Pro Accounts are $25/year. They're a bargain for sure.

dawn m. armfield · 2 years ago

I'm not going to raise pom-poms but I think Thomas Hawk has some valid points. Unless you're a long-time member of a community, it's hard to see the highs and lows that go along with it. I've been at Flickr nearly as long as Thomas and at Zooomr for quite a while now, as well. I've seen members up in arms over Flickr downtimes and still be supportive.

Shelley keeps talking about transparency and telling us what is going on. Thomas and Kris have done that. Sure, they've had a beer or wine or we've seen them eat dinner -- but the truth of the matter is that they have been honest from the beginning. They had high hopes for something that is really good and will be a positive addition to the photo community. If there was a wall to hit, they hit each one and yet still got up and kept moving. I think the pom-poms helped in that. When you don't have community support, it's hard to keep going.

I can't imagine any of the users not having backups of their photos elsewhere. I don't use Flickr, Zooomr, or even my own photoblog as the main storage of my photos. That's supplemental. In fact, many of us discussed this very topic on the chat boards last night and everyone who chimed in had external storage (DVD, hard drives, etc). We're not really losing our product.

What we've gained, though, is a stronger community. People have rallied and made donations. We are behind Kristopher and Thomas because we like their vision. Maybe it was a lot harder to attain than they first thought but the vision is a good one -- and it's one that doesn't just benefit them. They are looking out for us. So we look out for them, as well.

There aren't many online enterprises that say or do the same thing.

Garth · 2 years ago

I say keep the ice out wine, and the tomato juice out of beer :)

This is from a year ago, so they did not learn much since last time:

http://burningbird.net/stuff/how-to-roll-out-a-...

I also don't understand how Ron Conway got his $50,000 back without telling Thomas or Kris. However it happened, to have a guy like Ron Conway take his money back without asking after less than a year is not a good sign.

Businesses don't ask for donations, charities do.

Gareth Timms · 2 years ago

I'm going come at this from a different angle. Much of the discussion above concerns technology and concerns business planning. These have their place and are important however what is important to me is having access to others who will comment upon, who will encourage me and who I can learn from. This is what community is about. I have not found these to be as readily available on any other photography sites as on Zooomr. This is down to the community that Kris and Thomas have built and their attitudes and behaviour towards that community.

I have worked in community development and it is within these areas that Zooomr has demonstrated many of its strengths.

It is not exclusive in fact has gone to considerable lengths to include people from outside the West. But more fundementally people like Thomas and other experienced members (Raoul for example)go out of their way to look at and comment on other peoples pictures and not just the people they know. This has enabled newbies and technophobes like me to feel more comfortable able to post our thoughts and to get involved. Too often on the internet many of us are excluded by the language, by attitudes, by our own self doubt.

Zooomr is open Im not talking about code but letting the members know what is going on. The video this last week has been about this. They have tried to keep people informed and the community has gradually developed its own ways of doing this better. People have at times been critical but there has not been a huge outpouring of blaming but rather of understanding and support. This is so refreshing these days when people seem to find it easy to say the negative rather then the positive.

I think this week I have seen a community develop flourish and hopefully the new Zooomr will blooom sooon. And hey yep I've made a small donation and feel good about it.

Dare Obasanjo · 2 years ago

> I forgot about Flickr’s “pro” accounts. But if that’s really returning a huge return on investment I’d be very surprised.

Do you even use Flickr? The site has ads as well. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! wouldn't have shut down a large, profitable service like Yahoo! Photos to replace it with an unprofitable Flickr.

Seriously, sometimes you need to pause and reflect before spewing on these threads. I doubt the Flickr folks appreciate your questionable conclusions about their business in your attempt to make Zooomr look good.

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Dare: yeah, I use Flickr. I agree it wasn't a good moment of mine.

Podesta · 2 years ago

I just read through the last two-thirds of comments to see if anyone was actually fool enough to lay thousands or millions of greenbacks on Zooomr (awful name). It appears, that cheerleading and Robert's 'help my friends because they are my friends' appeal notwithstanding, no one has. That proves that even the people on this thread telling the Zoomies what they want to hear have common sense.

Keep fighting the good fight, Shelley. A lot of people criticizing you are being influenced to use their heads whether they like it or not.


Robert keeps bragging about the scale of Kristopher's sort of plans. Seems to me that the real issue might be that Kristopher needs to scale those dubious plans back. If Asia is his core region, maybe he should serve Asian markets first, rolling out from Korea or Japan.

Thomas Hawk · 2 years ago

Just to give people a quick update, thanks to Robert's support and efforts we were put in touch with Zoho this morning who have offered to help support Zooomr. Raj Vegesna has spent all afternoon with us getting us situated in Zoho's data center with a new server. That's where we are right now working to get Zooomr Mark III back up and running.

I haven't seen my kids or slept much in the last 48 hours but we will get Zooomr back up because we care about the Zooomr community.

Additionally Sun Microsystems has stepped up and has a server being sent over on a truck as we speak to reinforce our efforts to get back online.

A lot has been written here deriding our business efforts and plan so I'd like to take a minute to share that with you.

At present the $2.5 billion stock photography market is dominated by three companies primarily. Getty, Corbis, and Jupitermedia. These companies accept very few photographers each year and are gatekeepers to a market that many, many more photographers should be involved with. Many of the best photographers that I know have been rejected by the likes of Getty and Corbis.

If you do get accepted as a photographer there then you basically get paid 40% (I'm generalizing here) of the gross proceeds from the sale of your images.

For everybody else in the world, the only way to access this market is to go through the microstock agencies online. These agencies might accept some of your work and they might not. In the case of the largest of these (iStockphoto, now owned by Getty) they will pay you 20% of the proceeds of sale. There they sell your images for $1, $3 or $5. So if you sell a $3 photograph you might get paid 60 cents.

The average royalty free photograph at Getty by the way sells for about $285.

What the internet is best at is at eliminating the middleman. eBay did this. Craigslist did this. Many, many other successful internet ventures have done this.

What Zooomr wants to do is to open up this $2.5 billion market. You see the photos that I'm taking with my 5D. That my friend Lane Hartwell is taking with her 5D. That my friend Sam Bloomgberg-Rissman is shooting in Spain and Shanghai. These photographs are every bit as good as what the Pros at Getty and Corbis or shooting. And we are not alone. There are literally thousands of amazing photographers shooting out there right now. I know these people. They are my friends. I know their work. I favorite and comment on their images. And their images are every bit as good as the Pros.

Zooomr wants to open the stock photography market but we also want to change the equation of how the $2.5 billion market is divided up. You see, from our perspective, why should great photographers like Jeff Clow get paid 20% for a $1 image on iStockphoto? Even the pros. Why should they only get 40%.

What Zooomr wants to do is redefine the stock photography market and pay photographers 90%. Yes, 90% while letting them have complete pricing control over their images. Working photographers everywhere deserve to get the bulk of the money made on images that they create.

And you know what else. Do you know what the sale of $100 image will mean to a kid in India or China? Do you know how much more that will mean to them than it does to you and I? By localizing in 18 languages (and growing rapidly) Zooomr will open up this economic pie to the entire world.

And we think we can operate on a 10% cut. And if 10% is more than we need to get by we'll change the equation to 95% to the photographer.

We are not doing this to get rich. I took out a second mortgage on my house to make this work. We are doing this because we want to change the world of photo sharing. We are doing this because we passionate believe in photosharing and in online photosharing in all the forms it takes.

Flickr is a great service. I've been preaching to the folks at Flickr that they should do stock photography since the first moment that I met them. But that's not what Flickr is. Flickr is a non commercial service. Flickr will likely stay pretty much just as they are today for a long time. Innovating here and there, but not doing the exciting things that we want to do at Zooomr. Their next big feat will be to integrate about 2 bilion photos from Yahoo photos into Flickr.

By the way, I wish everyone would stop the either/or comparisons with Flickr and Zooomr. Trust me. There is room for both. I guarantee you that many of our most passionate users on Zooomr *also* have Flickr accounts. I do. I love Flickr. Will I bitch at them when I think they are doing the wrong thing? You bet. But I love Flickr and the Flickr Community. And at the same time I love Zooomr and the Zooomr Community. They are two different things. Both good.

Anyways. Zooomr will survive. Zooomr will survive because more than anything it is built on pure passion and love for photography and photosharing and community. And someday we will look back on these growing pains and remember that sometimes in order to do incredible things you must go through fire. We will go through fire but we will survive.

When we launched yesterday it was glorious. For about 10 glorious minutes you should have seen it. Many of us were in a chat room together and celebrating. And then we stumbled. Hard.

But you know what? There was a community there that picked us up and dusted us off and got us back on our feet. Robert Scoble. Zoho. Sun Microsystems. We got many more emails reaching out from other companies, even Microsoft. And we gotten dozens and dozens of emails from our community saying things like hey, I just donated $30. It's all I can afford but I wanted to help out in the only way that I could.

The Zooomr Community is strong. Shelly Powers spent 5 minutes in a chat room last night and has declared Zooomr unfit. But something great has been going on in that chat room all week long. Robert knows it. He's been in the room with us not for 5 minutes but actually for many many hours. Dave Sifry's stopped by. He sees what we are doing. Even the folks from Flickr have been by believe it or not. My favorite Flickr staffer Rev Dan Catt has even been hanging out with us. Our users have sent us food. One of our users drove Kristopher down to our data center last night at 1am in the morning. You tell me another company that has users this passionate.

As I write this I'm sitting on a hard floor in Zoho's space in Sunnyvale. Raj from Zoho is helping Kristopher get our servers back online at 8:30 at night in their space with their servers. This is what it's all about.

I will never forget the generousity of the community that helped fight for Zooomr this week. I love you all.

Power to the people. The best photographs in the world have yet to be taken.

Shelley · 2 years ago

Oh god, I hear the angels singing on high...

hillary · 2 years ago

shelley, it might be time for you to go away.

i've agreed with many of your points, but it's the attitude that i don't get. i'm sorry you're not on the A-list (just read your blog for the first time after scanning these comments); but hell, most of us aren't even on the Z-list.

i'm rooting for zooomr, b/c i think they *will* change the game. am i disappointed that after two failed launches they haven't gotten any sysadmin help for kristopher? yes, but i also can't really speak to it -- the whole money where your mouth is thing.

LayZ · 2 years ago

@72. Chris, let's remember Scoble supposedly tried to get MS to buy Flickr, but failed. What makes us think he would successful with his board in convincing them to help Zooomr?

Norby · 2 years ago

Good luck with the next next launch - glad to hear that you've got your hands on some fresh hardware to continue the battle. I hope you got two of everything, with extra cheese this time though :)

Operations can be a real drag sometimes, but the real world is always out there, somewhere...

-/\/

Podesta · 2 years ago

I spoke too soon. But, at least equipment is being 'loaned' instead of money invested. Not that the lenders will get the equipment back if they let it leave the premises.

striatic · 2 years ago

shelley, i'm not sure that i agree with your tone, but i certainly understand your frustration.

i really honestly hope that zooomr launches and that everyone gets paid a huge chunk of this apparently 2.5 billion dollar stock photo market and that there are zooomr museums set up in every major city with big plasma screens and laser light shows of thomas hawk and kris tate's faces across the moon once a year on "international zooomr is awesome day".

but a lot of this is about 'the dream' .. does anyone really believe that if zooomr launches marketplace and they put up their photos for sale that everyone is going to be reaping the harvest? it is far from a sure thing and skepticism shouldn't be a dirty word, not even in the blogosphere.

which is to say that this is a social gamble on top of a technical gamble on top of a financial gamble and while it's great that people have faith in it, there's also very little to show for all that faith right now.

i don't think it should be heretical to point out that by many important criteria, zooomr is well short of 'awesome', and that perhaps this isn't such a great 'evangelism opportunity'.

evangelism for and faith in a site praying for resurrection. there's a kind of religious fervor around this thing that befuddles me.

the funniest thing is that this REALLY reminds me of ludicorp's first project, GNE - which had similar back end and financial issues. except in the zooomr version of that story out of pride they keep developing the original product instead of switching to something else.

striatic · 2 years ago

just to clarify, ludicorp was making GNE and in a deep financial hole with a community of thousands saying "build the game! build the game! we're with you all the way!"

it is precisely because they decided to listen to their brains/common sense, and go AGAINST the wishes and passions of the community to build flickr instead of GNE that they are anything but a footnote in the history of "web 2.0".

Roger Lancefield · 2 years ago

@hillary

> shelley, it might be time for you to go away.

The guys at zooomr won't have the luxury of being able to say that to serious investors or VCs, and most of those are going to have a very similar attitude to that Shelley is displaying here.

That said, I wish zooomr luck, but let's bear in mind that even if they pull this off, it's not going to be sustainable or repeatable (for zooomr or others). Other youthful startups on a similar trajectory had better not be fooled into thinking that this kind of publicity and reaction can be generated twice.

Steve · 2 years ago

I'm not even going to profess to know anything about Zooomr, or about when they launched a real RTM product. However, it would be very clear to me not to put high expectations into a site that has BETA in the name of the URL. I know when I use items that are in beta, if that item or site goes down, I just check back occasionally to see if they are back up. I certainly don't berate them for not having a business model, or for not having the proper infrastructure in place to support the growing community.

Now, if this was a true RTM product, sure, I'd have a hard time supporting them if this went on this long.

Trevor Carpenter · 2 years ago

I'm working on a Greasemonkey script that will simply omit all comments by Shelley, if anyone is interested.

Ethan · 2 years ago

"I’m working on a Greasemonkey script that will simply omit all comments by Shelley, if anyone is interested."

Yes, because God forbid that you come into contact with opinions that differ from your own.

And really? Considering the sheer volume of what can objectively be called trolling by others on this site, Shelley alone warrants the magic eraser treatment, huh?

While you're at it, make a script to help me keep score. Here's what I have so far:

Dare calls Scoble out on an errant comment about Flickr: Receives mea culpa.
Shelley questions how zooomr got to this point, and how they're going to prevent it in the future: Threatened with the magic eraser treatment.

Can I just say that I've got your "conversation" right here?

Robert Scoble · 2 years ago

Ethan: I don't erase comments, at least not Shelley's. She has a point of view I appreciate.

-gary · 2 years ago

I was thinking about this whole deal this morning and wondered, why doesn't Sun start an incubator type of program?

They could stock a datacenter with a bizillion of their servers and run them like Media Temple does their grid service. Lure in startups with the promise of free computing power and space for something like 2 years, with caps on processor and bandwidth usage of course. When their term ends and they, hopefully, move on to be a profitable company, give them a discount on their own hardware.

Startups can then focus on their service and building a monetary base while Sun can focus on introducing startups to their hardware and OS with the hope that it will translate into sales down the road. Seems like a win-win to me. It will cost some money, but it pales in comparison to their overall budget trying to push their AMD based hardware. Bandwidth is so cheap these days, it would almost be a non-issue.

John Rav · 2 years ago

Sorry, This does not inspire too much confidence for the future. I would think that after the first failed launch attempt of Mark III which caused a week downtime, that a little more testing would have happened. Stability or load testing (?) not sure what else as this isn't in my field. (even not being my field, I know this should have been planned and executed more professionally.) Hardware does not fail for no reason and Planning does not cost more money...

It may feel good to write about how good that 10 minutes of up-time was, but I am sure the volume that crushed your equipment was just a small percentage of actual traffic. So in hind site, that should serve as a warning I would think. I understand that right now your best option is to scramble, beg for help and attempt to save face. In the big picture, I just wonder how many times you can 'cry wolf' (since you are all familiar with bed time stories) before you are dead in the water. Personally, I know I will need to see some long term stability, before jumping back on this bandwagon. Nothing personal.

I will also chip in the agreement that the lack of a simple message on the zooomr home page was irritating at best. Do not assume everyone is ready willing or able to jump on the latest gizmo/video to find basic information...

Regards,
-John

Coleman Hines · 2 years ago

While there's no doubt that Kristopher is a talented youngster with a big future, I for one am very happy to see Thomas Hawk having to eat some humble pie.

Welcome to the real world.

This is only the first of Zooomr's challenges in the transition to a viable website. I wait to see how they handle scale when they get to 20 million photos, or managing a community when they get more than 50,000 active users.

I hope Thomas Hawk has learnt that taking cheap pot shots at competitors is easy but its not so easy when they're his own challenges. Less talk more action fellas.

But on the whole, good luck to Zooomr.

Alex · 2 years ago

I can't help but notice the divide between people who are praising Zooomr and the ones who are criticizing it, seems to be the exact same as the divide between people who have any technical understanding of what Kris & Thomas have accomplished, and those who don't.

The comments to this post contain a whole lot of "Things crashed. Since they don't have as much backup hardware available as, say, flickr, *OBVIOUSLY* they're not ready for prime-time."

Seriously, say it with me. Startup. Startups don't have money pouring out of their ears to swap out hardware in 5 minutes, nor do they have staff size required to get something like that done.

They've had hiccups. So what? Anyone who writes software understands what a massive undertaking Zooomr would have been, even if one had a TEAM of developers at their disposal.

The fact that a company consisting of all of one developer could even get THIS far speaks volumes to their talent and dedication. Just think what they'll be able to accomplish when they're over the initial humps and have some breathing room.

It can be really disheartening to work yourself to the bone and accomplish something amazing, and then be nitpicked to death by a bunch of people who see a couple hiccups and write the whole thing off as damaged goods written by talentless hacks. And really, it's just a dumb attitude. As far as the nay-sayers go, I'd really like to see any one of you do better.