« Off again | Home | Alan Johnston »
Dear oh dear
By Huw Leslie | June 3, 2007
The new launch of Zooomr has been a shambles, and the final product isn’t even that interesting. It is far too buggy to have been released and it adds little in the way of innovation. I was going to write a review of Mark III when it was released on GizBuzz, but I don’t think I will now, mainly because I feel guilty being horrible about it, for obvious reasons. Fortunately I can write it here because hardly anyone reads this blog, so I feel less guilty.
For an excellent account of the release, check out this post by Zoli Erdos. If what he’s saying is true, then Kris’ lack of experience has been a major problem behind the release. It kinda pains me to write this given the immense respect I (and others on the Oratos team, incidentally) have for what Kris has achieved.
Where from here, then? It has become clear that the KT-TH partnership on Zooomr is no longer enough if it is to prosper. They have handled the community aspect mostly brilliantly (albeit with an occasional lack of sufficient information - see Zoli’s post). Things that haven’t been handled well have been engineering and monetisation. Both those point to needing VC or at least angel funding. Funding would provide the ability to hire a couple of experienced engineers and investors would provide the pressure to find a proper business model.
They should also build out a ‘community board’. Get famous people from the community like Scoble (who would love to do this), as well as some clever entrepreneurs from the valley, who might be less known but have better ideas, and finally some random Zooomr users who live locally to help in coming up with ideas and strategy, with monthly-or-so meetings. Zooomr gets great advice and coverage, and in return Zooomr leverages their community to generate lots of good will for everyone who helps them out, as they have done with those who lent them hardware this week. They shouldn’t pay the advisors.
That should solve the problem.
Topics: Uncategorized |
I’m really annoyed that some things appear to have regressed.
Particularly, I can’t seem to find working RSS feeds for photo pages anymore, which is breaking the Recent Photos functionality on my site.
The old feed URLs give 404s and I can’t find any new ones.
Seems to be a bit faster than this morning, however. Meh.
Posted by: Peter Upfold on June 3rd, 2007 at 7:50 amI can’t find any account settings at all. Either they’re not there, or they’re hard to find; both are equally bad.
I think I might switch to Flickr.
Posted by: Huw Leslie on June 3rd, 2007 at 7:57 amIf nothing else, I’ve gotten to network with Scoble, Thomas Hawk, Dave Sifry, and a few other folks over the past weeks. So to that end, being able to partake in the community that Zooomr fosters, I’m not complaining.
Otherwise, it is a shame it took so long (and is now going so slow).
Posted by: Chris on June 3rd, 2007 at 9:53 amAs to a community board: that is totally something that Calacanis would do. In fact, if he were a Zooomr user, I’m sure he would have proposed something similar on his blog (and then offered a job at “Project Z” to the person who implemented it
)
Posted by: Chris on June 3rd, 2007 at 9:54 amRSS support is apparently coming back.
So I’m happy in that respect.
Still a bit disappointed about OpenID not being required as it was an important service that was using it as the sole login solution.
Ah well.
Posted by: Peter Upfold on June 3rd, 2007 at 10:53 amTo be honest, I think I might turn this into a Gizbuzz post after all. To treat Zooomr any differently just because it was built by a 19-year-old is showing just the sort of prejudice which we deride.
Re OpenID: I think requiring OpenID is a barrier to adoption in the short term, as I outlined in that Gizbuzz comment a while ago. Zooomr’s recognised that, and has regressed because of it. At least they still offer it, though.
Posted by: Huw Leslie on June 3rd, 2007 at 11:06 am