="text/javascript"> ="text/javascript">

</script>

Zooomr is a website created in 2005 by web developer Kristopher Tate of BlueBridge Technologies Group for sharing digital photos.

The site is in continuous development and exited its private beta stage in February 2006. According to Tate, the site has well over 15,000 users, who can browse and comment on others' photos as well as upload their own.

Zooomr

URL	http://www.zooomr.com/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Photo sharing
Registration	Free
Owner	BlueBridge Technologies Group
Created by	Kristopher Tate

Recent developments

On March 11, 2006, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted an article on Zooomr that termed the photo-sharing site as "Flickr on Steroids," a common phrase now used in association with Zooomr. This article is best known as the starting date of Zooomr's up-start popularity.

On June 19, 2006, Thomas Hawk, a well known San Franciscan photographer and blogger, officially joined Tate to work as Zooomr's "Chief Evangelist."

On July 17, 2006, Zooomr released Zooomr 2. Zooomr 2 features SmartSets, improved geotagging of photos via TagMap, as well as many speed, design and performance enhancements.

On August 22, 2006, features such as Notes and Portals were added to Zooomr.

Features

In many ways, the site appears to be modeled after another well-known photo site called Flickr, and while the two services do share a number of so-called Web 2.0 features such as tagging, Ajax, RSS, and GeoTagging, each site offers features the other does not.

GeoTagging inside Zooomr with TagMap

Zooomr was added to jUploadr, a Java-based batch photo uploader, on September 11th 2006. Previously users had to upload photos with an online form limited to 10 images.

One feature that sets Zooomr apart from similar sites is multi-login capability, using a service called OpenID. OpenID allows users to register accounts with unaffiliated websites (in particular LiveJournal), and log into Zooomr with that same account without having to type the password a second time. At one time, the site allowed users to log in via XMPP with an account from Google, but these accounts have since been migrated to the OpenID system.

Other features include LightBox (not to be confused with the aforementioned LightMap), which resembles a slide show; Zooomrtations, which allows users to append short audio commentary to individual photos; SmartSets, which are dynamically-generated albums (much like iPhoto's Smart Albums) and PeopleTags, which allows users to add themselves inside of photos, along with searching for people inside of photos.

Recently added features include Notes, Portals, and an improved version of PeopleTags. These three features allow a user to draw boxes over sections of a photo in order to append a portion of text, or point out an individual in the photo, or to link to another photo (much like hotspots in QuickTime VR.

Accounts

Zooomr has no limits on uploading, storing and archiving photos.

Licensing

Like Flickr, Zooomr enables users to licence their photos in different ways. Though photos default to All Rights Reserved, users may opt to licence their photos under various Creative Commons licencing schemes.

Localization

Zooomr is localized in 16 locales (Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English (UK & US), Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Mongolian, Polish, Portuguese (BR), Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish). Notably, many other websites commonly classified as "Web 2.0" have not embraced localization, distinguishing Zooomr in that regard. Compared with other photo-sharing sites, Zooomr tends to have a higher proportion of photos from countries other than the US.

http://beta.zooomr.com/home

Sign-In | Sign-Up | Blog Universally the best way to share, search, store and sort your photos online.

edit @ 2007/05/24 20:06:40 ="text/javascript">
edit @ 2007/06/10 14:54:34
edit @ 2007/06/10 15:59:17
="text/javascript"> edit @ 2007/06/10 17:57:31

http://flickr.com/ is web of flickr

Already a member? Sign in. Or, take a tour.

When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London. - Bette Midler

Find a photo of... Or, browse popular tags?

Explore Flickr Browse interesting photos shared over the last 7 days. NEW See popular cameras with Camera Finder

Sign Up | Take a tour | About Flickr | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | Community Guidelines

Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2.0 application.

In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.

Flickr

URL	http://www.flickr.com/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Photo sharing
Owner	Yahoo!
Created by	Ludicorp
Launched	February 2004
Current status	Active

History

Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based company founded in 2002. Ludicorp launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early incarnations of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr's back end systems evolved away from the Game Neverending's codebase.

Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent is pending.

In March 2005, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28 all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law.

On May 16, 2006 Flickr updated its services from Beta to "Gamma" along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site's FAQ, the term "Gamma", rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.

On December 29th, 2006 the upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month (from 20MB) and were removed from Pro Accounts, permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts (up from 2GB per month).

In January 2007, Flickr announced that the "Old Skool" members, those that pre-date the Yahoo acquisition, will be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service. This move was criticised by some users.

Flickr later added limits of 3,000 contacts and 75 tags for photos. Pre-existing accounts with over 3,000 contacts would not be able to add more until some are removed, with the same applying to tag limits.

Features

Organization

Flickr allows photo submitters to categorize images by use of keyword "tags" (a form of metadata), which allow searchers to easily find images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Flickr provides rapid access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user-generated tags, Flickr repeatedly has been cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomy, although Thomas Vander Wal suggested Flickr is not the best example of folksonomy. Also, Flickr was the first website to implement tag clouds.

Flickr also allows users to categorize their photos into "sets", or groups of photos that fall under the same heading. However, sets are more flexible than the traditional folder-based method of organizing files, as one photo can belong to one set, many sets, or none at all. (The concept is directly analogous to the "labels" in Google's Gmail.) Flickr's "sets", then, represent a form of categorical metadata rather than a physical hierarchy. Sets may be grouped into "collections", and collections further grouped into higher-order collections.

Finally, Flickr offers a fairly comprehensive web-service API that allows programmers to create applications that can perform almost any function a user on the Flickr site can do.

Organizr

Organizr is a web application for organizing photos within a Flickr account. It allows users to modify tags, descriptions, and set groupings, and to place photos on a world map (a feature provided in conjunction with Yahoo! Maps). It uses Ajax to closely emulate the look, feel, and quick functionality of desktop-based photo-management applications. Because of this, Organizr greatly simplifies the batch organization of photos, which is more cumbersome with the web interface.

Access control

Flickr provides both private and public image storage. A user uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image. A photo can be flagged as either public or private. Private images are visible by default only to the uploader, but they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family. Privacy settings also can be decided by adding photographs from a user's photostream to a "group pool". If a group is private then all the members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public then the photo becomes public as well. Flickr also provides a "contact list" which can be used to control image access for a specific set of users in a way similar to that of LiveJournal.

In Fall 2006 Flickr created a "guest pass" system that allows for private photos to be shared with non Flickr members. For instance, a person could email this pass to parents who may not have an account to allow them see the photos otherwise restricted from public view. This setting allows sets to be shared, or all photos under a certain privacy category (friends or family) to be shared.

In March 2007, Flickr added new content filtering controls that permit members to specify by default what types of images they generally upload (photo, art/illustration, or screenshot) and how "safe" (i.e. unlikely to offend others) their images are, as well as to specify that information individually for specific images. In addition, users can specify the same criteria when searching for images. There are some restrictions on searches for certain types of users: non-members must always use SafeSearch, which omits images noted as potentially offensive, while members whose Yahoo! accounts indicate that they are underage may use SafeSearch or moderate SafeSearch, but cannot turn SafeSearch off completely.

Many of its users allow their photos to be viewed by anyone, forming a large collaborative database of categorized photos. By default, other users can leave comments about any image they have permission to view, and in some cases can add to the list of tags associated with an image.

Interaction and compatibility

Flickr's functionality includes RSS and Atom feeds and an API that allows independent programmers to expand its services.

The core functionality of the site relies on standard HTML and HTTP features, allowing for wide compatibility among platforms and browsers. Organizr uses Ajax, with which most modern browsers are compliant, and most of Flickr's other text-editing and tagging interfaces also possess Ajax functionality.

Images can be posted to the user's collection via email attachments, enabling direct uploads from many cameraphones and applications with email capabilities.

Flickr has increasingly been adopted by many web users as their primary photo storage site, especially members of the weblog community. In addition, it is popular with Macintosh and Linux users, who are often locked out of photo-sharing sites because they require the Windows/Internet Explorer setup to work.

Flickr uses the Geo microformat on the pages for over 3 million geotagged images.

Archiving

With an active free account, each user only has access to the most recent 200 images he or she has uploaded. Older images are not deleted, and are still accessible via their URLs (e.g. linked from another website); however, they will no longer be accessible to tag or edit from the user's Flickr account.Free accounts which are inactive for 90 consecutive days are automatically deleted.

Free account users who upgrade to a Pro account regain access to all photos they have posted, including those older than their current 200.

Licensing

Flickr offers users the ability to release their images under certain common usage licenses. The licensing options primarily include the Creative Commons attribution-based and minor content-control licenses - although jurisdiction-specific licenses cannot be selected. As with "tags", the site allows easy searching of only those images that fall under a specific license.

Integration with Yahoo Web Search

Since August 24, 2006, certain Yahoo! web searches will return image results from Flickr, for example "funny photos" or "travel photography".

Google also shows Flickr pages especially when searching for screen names and owner names. However searching the words in Flickr photo titles or tags will not show up Flickr pages.

="text/javascript">
edit @ 2007/06/10 15:55:25