No Offense #2: Zooomr is going to fail

Let me preface this again with I like the people running the site, namely Kris Tate but I have serious concerns about the business model and/or the future of Zooomr. SOOOO many people have praised his success, skills and age in creating this Flickr killer and amazing website. People who have given him props include:
Slashdot, Techcrunch, Chrono Tron, Thomas Hawke, etc…

Have they all been fooled or is it just me? I was talking about Zooomr with a friend and we were in disbelief that people like it so much. If you haven’t heard of the site let me tell you what it offers:

Bottom-line: It copied flickr.com, name included.

Yes, I agree there are some minor feature additions that Flickr has not added or does not plan to add for its users, including:

- Photo Uploading and tagging (including geo tagging)

- 15 different languages

- Google Maps integration

- Trackbacks and Zooomrtations (wasn’t working at time of this review)

But still here are my real concerns:

1- The name is a copy, flickr vs zooomr, notice any resemblance?

2- The site layout and functionality is almost identical.

Home Page:

flickr homepagezooomr homepage

Browse Page:

flickr dog pagezooomr dog page

Photo Page:

flickr dog pagezooomr dog

3- It is just another photo website that 3 bloggers want to write about first and it got blown way out of proportion.

4- Geotagging is just taking tags and plugging them into a map, it is not that revolutionary.

I really respect Kris for driving some new features to the world of online photos but none are revolutionary.

Some may say he is challenging or driving new things in photo but the stuff is pretty soft. I do notice that when there was just Yahoo people were very satisfied and accepted that search was satisfactory and didn’t expect any better. Yet when Google came around there was SIGNIFICANT difference in the product. This is just another pet project by a very smart kid that won’t last this bubble.

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10 Responses to “No Offense #2: Zooomr is going to fail”

  • Chrono
    April 17th, 2006
    11:38 pm

    fair enough, you raise some good points but the link to slashdot and thomashawk don’t work.

    As for the name, yeah it’s a lot like Flickr but I guess Zooomr wanted to give peoeple something easy to comprehend and btw zooomr is more related to photos tha flickr (going by the name)!

    As for the layout, I completely disagree, Zooomr has a beautiful layoutr which I have blogged as one of it’s plus points.

    Geotagging: No comments, I don’t use it!!

    My bottomline: You just don’t provide enough reasons as to why Zooomr sucks or so!

    Cheers!

  • Sean
    April 17th, 2006
    11:39 pm

    Heres the thing, unless Flickr keeps innovating, they’re gonna be passed up. Zooomr has that fluid ability to adapt and add features that Flickr used to have. There are some obvious similarities, but they’re disappearing every day as new features are launched and old bugs get ironed out. And of course Zooomr is multi-lingual, which is sorely missed in Flcikr, not everyone speaks english.

  • KirbyP
    April 18th, 2006
    4:59 am

    I don’t really get zooomer either. The language thing? OK, so there are different front pages? Doesn’t seem to be stopping Flickr anyway. See this.
    Geotagging? Some are already geotagging in Flickr using their own folksonomy.
    OK, so no integrated Googlemaps. How long will it be before they integrate the new Yahoo maps?

  • Nick Douglas
    April 18th, 2006
    8:38 am

    Wait, who wrote this entry?

  • Rohail
    April 18th, 2006
    1:32 pm

    Zooomr definitely has a lot of international appeal. I think it has enough potential to stick around. Nevertheless, nice blog Noah. Check out mine when you get a chance: http://www.rohailrizvi.com

  • john
    April 20th, 2006
    8:32 pm

    You argument is that zooomr is the same as flickr and therefore it will fail. Don’t you have to posit the flickr will fail for this to hold?

  • Dan100
    April 25th, 2006
    1:16 pm

    Er, no. Flickr has won this particular market. A copy-cat isn’t going to make in-roads.

  • Aston
    April 27th, 2006
    9:41 am

    Zooomr just feels like a cheap imitation of Flickr with a few extra features that nobody really needs. It’s ugly and it’s slow as heck. I spent half an hour exploring it, got frustrated and left. If they get a faster server and offer free unlimited hosting for a while, maybe it might catch on, but not as it stands now.

  • Zooomer - So what is the deal « Like the Ocean
    October 5th, 2006
    9:30 pm

    [...] So why the heck not give this a try. I remember reading somewhere that Zooomer uses (or used and some even go to the extent of debating it is just a matter of copying.) Flickr APIs. And additionally there was some talk from Flickr as not to share APIs with direct competitors. In my view healthy competition always makes things better for the end user !!! [...]

  • Pau
    November 29th, 2007
    3:46 am

    Noone is gonna use a copy of flickr FULL of Google Ads. Simply disgusting.

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