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17 Year Old Creates Flickr Competitor
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has an article up on a new Flickr competitor called Zooomr. The interesting thing about all of this that it was developed in only three months by a 17 year old and to top it all off, the site is currently localized in 16 languages."
When I was 17 I was...umm......creating a hotmail account. So there!
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Competition is nice, but innovation is far more impressive.
Although it is nice to see someone so young get the attention they deserve, this isn't unique. I can personally vouche there are thousands of people between the ages of 15-18 that have the potential to create things like this. In terms of the technology behind this type of website, I've been working with it for almost 2 years. The problem with people in this age group getting noticed, or getting the attention they deserve, is quite simply a financial issue.
Not to gloat, but I've created some pretty usefull projects and technologies in my time comperable to this one, just as simple side projects. However, most of them don't make it past a few months of development for one simple reason: I can't financially support it. As I just noticed when I tried to load the Zoomr website, the ammount of money needed to buy a server that can support such a community is overwhelming, especially for someone in the age group of 15-18 who's primary concern to buying lunch every day.
I would love to see more projects of this calibur come from this same younger generation, and I would love to be part of such projects. But getting ones foot off the ground is the first, and hardest step towards this success.
Kristopher Tate, the 17-year-old who make Zoomr, will undoubtedly become noticed by companies looking for such ambitious programmers. But he got lucky; the rest of us aren't so fortunate.
google.slashdot
Flikr can handle a slashdotting.
But is it open source? I think not! Future Bill Gates who will one day terrorize the world!!
The hard bit is getting people to use the new system instead of flickr, and if the new site catches on, scaling well with the growth.
Getting the site slashdotted is a good way of getting started on the first bit
Good for this kid. He's not necessarily a genius, but he is atypical IMO. Not because other kids his age couldn't do the same, but because most other kids his age aren't because they're being sedated by mass media.
When I was 14 I was doing programming for a Fortune 500 company; when I was 15 I wrote and designed the accounting system for my city's municipal water company; when I was 16 I wrote my own BBS system, which got the attention of Bell Atlantic who then contracted with me to develop a prototype of one of the first online electronic yellow page systems. By the time I was 17, I had written software for Disney, the United Nations and plenty of other companies. I really don't think I was special... I just made the most out of my time and resources. If I had unlimited access to a Playstation or 500 channels of television when I was a teen, I'd probably be working for an insurance company or a restaurant instead of being self employed and successful doing something I truly enjoy.
It's nice to see that someone could come and eat a "professionally done" site's lunch though. True, they'd need the financial backing and whatnot, but I think this shows that it's still possible for a new startup to come and do something better than the current king of the hill.
If someone can get some Zooomr screenshots, maybe they can post them to Flicr?
Aside from being a Flickr knockoff (and being slashdotted), zooomr sounds like it has some serious potential. If and when their servers get back online I'm definitely going to try it out. I'm salivating over GPS data within pictures, associating pictures from different users based on time and place.
Linking users to faces in a picture sounds like the perfect blend of Facebook and Flickr, hopefully without the obsessive/compulsive behavior found on the Facebook social network. I wonder how long before Flickr turns up the heat??
At this risk of completely blowing up his server, here is a testing version of his site: http://beta.zooomr.com/
The article says you can log in with your account from several other services. All are covered by OpenID except one - Google! Did Google open up some kind of authentication API while I was sleeping?
It would be hard to truly compete against Flickr, since it offers a great deal of power that the user can find behind the simplistic interface. O'Reilly has already released Flickr Hacks . I doubt that this kid's creation is half as hackable.
The only thing that I don't like about Flickr is that it allows one to upload an enormous amount of photos each month, but limits the free account to three albums.
Localization systems are really easy once you know how to do them. I used to be intimidated by such things, but then I started making phpBB mods. I saw that the phpBB localization system was basically a set of arrays of text strings that gets loaded depending upon the user settings. Then the array is used as variables to drop in the appropriate text. I've since seen some better systems, and mostly I'm impressed with how simple good developers can make it.
I put some of that into practice for Agitar, a company whose site is available in English & Japanese. I don't speak Japanese, I just added some tweaks to a Movable Type system, and voila, two fields per entry. I do the English, and any employee who speaks Japanese will enter a translation. I suspect that I can create a basic i18n framework for PHP in an afternoon.
What would be really cool would be if he did the translations himself. Does he speak 16 languages? Or did he sit with Babelfish or Google, and nurse some automated translations into something sensible? That's the step that takes talent or hard effort. I would be impressed if he did that completely without outside help. For that matter, if he has a system in place for people to upload translations, have them verified, and be automatically put into effect, that would be impressive too. I tried such a thing, but I just couldn't find good ways to deal with the character sets and launder data that is so open-ended, without human inspection.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Ah, but for those of us who have hundreds or even thousands of images loaded and categorized in flickr, how easy is it to move to another service? Are we seeing the dawn of a new and exciting kind of vendor lock-in?
I know that flickr has a helpful, open API; I just wonder if it's enough.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Are you 17? If so, this is a great accomplishment and maybe somebody ought to write an article about you. On the other hand, if you're not 17, bugger off.
At the risk of straying completely off topic, this guy looks strikingly like Mitch Hedberg.
That is all I have to add to this conversation. Carry on.
--Nycto
building 7 fell in exactly the same exactly symmetrical way as WTC 1 and 2
uhhh...down?
And you mustn't upload NC rated pics because the SysAdmin is 17.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
At 17, most people are creating a first post, and others are making the world a better place.
:)
At 17 I believe I wrote RemorseView, an ascii/ansi viewer for ACiD/Remorse.
I doubt I made the world a better place.. but I kept myself occupied.
Holy shit. Nice non sequitur there! Got ADD much? :-)
Is it not just a melding of already existing products? If it is then what matter is it that a 17 year old did it? That said though, I'm glad he's getting the attention for having the sense to do stick it all in there in the first place.
Imageshack doesn't use the annoying sign up forms.
If you need to show something fast and don't want the hassle then Imageshack is it.
I use it all the time. Fast and covenient.
Not to troll, but I find this whole thing a little odd.
In the terms of service: "By accessing the web site Zooomr (hereafter known as the "Web Site"), a service of BlueBridge Technologies Group..."
While both the summary and TFA seem to focus on it being developed by a 17 year old in three months, the website has job postings. The article seems to gloss over the fact the entire project is sponsored (owned) by some company. Is this a case of sensationalistic journalism? This doesn't seem like a case where someone hacked it out of their basement. It seems unlikely the company picked it up AFTER development started since no mention of the company is made in any journal entry. So if the company is backing the project financially, am i the only one who finds it odd that it is not mentioned in any journal entry? It's a little weird that he's the face of the project, but it could be a PR move. It definintely doesn't add up the way the article's author seems to want to imply.
I like how about half of the comments respond how easy it is for the kid to have created the site, or that there's not much innovation going on there.
I often agree with both of these statements, including for Google, Y!, MSN sites mentioned in Slashdot stories. They're all a bunch of Javascript. Wowee. That's a pain in the butt, but it's not innovative. There's some server technology that's pretty cool behind Gmail and the like, but as time goes on, those bottlenecks will be solved in a more commoditized way.
So my question to you all is, why would you own Google or Yahoo stock for more than five minutes, to ride up the next big push? It seems like there's virtually no long term value in any website's technology. Surely someone else will take the idea and improve on it at some point -- it's already happened several times over in the last 10 years. We're already seeing the fast decline in the quality of Google's results, and here come a new wave of search engine rivals knocking on the door. Impossible? Ask AltaVista.
Or do we just live in a world where brand name is all we're investing in anymore? It's has to be branding we buy because no one actually creates products for the ages. When someone creates a "one click ordering" button, that's what they get patented. Owning the rights to a button on a computer screen like inventors once owned the phonograph, or film emulsion... that's what buying stock is about.
I remember when a Coke used to be a nickel, dammit.
But the guy does a lot boasting, sounds like it might be tall tales...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
He should have used http://www.myspacegrill.com/
Hopefully we will not soon see him sprawled out in a Tiger Beat photo spread...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Flickr has an established user base and all, but this should still be funny for Yahoo execs. You buy flickr and tell you shareholders what a great value it is, how wonderful it is, blah, blah, blah. Then some 17 year old shows up and duplicates (actually does better than) your acquisition in his spare time :)
It's not because the site has been slashdotted. This message was up there over the weekend. It just looks like they are taking a while to move the site to the new server. And BTW it's zooomr with 3 'o's ;)
This reminds me so much of the internet landscape from 7-8 years ago. Add a 2.0 to the end of the internet, and people forget all the hard lessons they should have learned from before.
My main complaint, a similar complaint from the first bubble, is a huge waterfall of sites that implement only a few unique ideas. Back then it was internet stores and advertising, today it is tagging, blogs, and letting the user interact with the website.
Great ideas are obvious - once you are told them.
The ability to recognise a great idea and take it
from idea to reality is a tremendous skill. Its harder
than you think. Or to put it another way - just
how many million dollar concepts have you turned into
reality recently? Hmmmm???
You may be as good a coder as this guy - but he took
some great ideas (that you didn't have by the way)
and developed them to reality. Interface with OpenID -
of course! Sound bites, google maps, etc etc.
Obvious now we know.
When finished, it should be possible to search only for pictures with just one girl, whose legs are spread exactly 57 degrees in a "sitting up" pose. ...it's nice to know you've got priorities straight here. :D
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
You have no idea what the site offers. For all you know, it goes WAY beyond flickr. Actually, I doubt that it does go beyond, but I would not be surprised to see that his arch. is a great deal more flexable WRT to what the future holds. Keep in mind that Flickr was probably more of a slow hack that developed to where it is. OTH, this guy has an idea of where he is heading (he is not a trailblazer).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When I was eight I greated my first game. Back then it I wrote it in GWBASIC. Difficult to imagine but I think I would have been programming C# or Java if I started now and was eight all over again. Not that I would want to :D
Ok, so the idea is not new, the implementation for many people here wouldn't be a problem, so the only reason for the hype must be this guy's age... which is again no reason to celebrate this one guy. Ok, credit has to be given, he managed to raise attention, but that's more about hie (or whoever raised the news) pr skills. 17 years that doesn' count that much young in the programming realm, not today, not in the past. Hell, some of my 17 years old friends - that was around '95 - created wonderful pieces of software (and even before, we started coding with one of my friends years before that on everything we could get our hands on), and today kids gather programming knowledge much earlier. Don't want to seem to talk from some high horse, but I have to tell, when you are sorrounded by talented people, such "news" don't seem news anymore. Of course, for the general audience it's a different matter.
:].
:) (or is that too easy these days ? :P)
Again, I don't want to diminish or lessen this guy's achievements, I just feel that if we praise him, we should praise everybody else with such and similar and better achiements also. But we'd probably have to dedicate an entire site for these kids
Anyway, I congratulate him for managing to get on slahdot
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
... three options: a) that's a lie, b) he's a genius, c) the code is unmaintainable. being a cynical old sod, i'd bet all my money on the third option. and no, i don't know the person in question nor do i think badly of him. just experience in the business...
It's not that complex a piece of code. The hard parts are coming up with an idea and getting people to use it. He copied someone else's idea and so far nobody uses his version.
Shouldn't the title be, "17 Year Old Creates Flickr Killer"
Thank you for bringing some sanity back to this entire thing. If I had mod points (disabled the wish to moderate long ago), I'd mod you up.
Web 2.0 is a bubble that will pop, sooner or later. I for one, as a little-known 16 year old because I don't do anything bubble-ish, am sticking to tried and true methods. XHTML, CSS, plain designs with little-to-no Javascript, that, above all, work (at least at a basic level) on any browser I've thrown at them. Of course they're 'tweaked' a bit for IE (using MS's comment if statements), but then again what design doesn't need that?
My opinion is simple - if a design is unusable when a user disables Javascript, CSS, cookies, applets, plugins, images, popups, or anything else... Then it's a bad design. If it is usable with none of those enabled, but possibly enhanced with them enabled, then it's a good design. In basic terms: if it is unusable in Lynx, then it's a bad design. That doesn't mean it has to look great in Lynx - it just means it has to be usable on a basic level - access content, post comments, etc.
Once again, thank you for bringing some sanity back to this - Web 2.0 is indeed a bubble.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
And no, not partying at college. Minimum-wage-all-going-toward-rent-and-beer binge.
;)
At 29 I've finally gotten my life back together but I'm _still_ not as productive as this kid.
Kudos to him, I hope him all the success in the world. Once he extinguishes his server of course.
1. Create a lame clone of a well known web site ... let's say Flikr
2. Fill it up with Google adds
3. Anonymously submit a story on Slashdot saying that the new site is a Flikr KILLER
4. Profit
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Should we accredite people for something jsut because of thier age? Why is this story in the news? ...Well we can gain two things from this. For some people it might be a nobrainer on how to make your child have more potential to be succesfull, - you just introduce it to the right environment.
But for the masses who don't know how to raise their child stories like these could be an inspiration to try harder, perhaps they should look at how his parents have brought him up and apply that same technique to their own children.
Stories like these can also be used as a motivational factor for other people. It shows that anyone can get somewhere if they try hard enough.
Well at least I'm impressed/motivated by this guy most people his age still have a localised view of the world.
\(^o^)/
do we really need another flickr thing....... ?
damn... ppl really loves unnecessary crap.
was visiting the place for some free food, and next thing you know, i am being "slashdotted" on zoomer site. PS. I am the f00 in the white shirt.
Now more people understand that age doesn't matter.
If this trend continues, Skateboard-City.com will be mentioned on Slashdot... I've just turned 17. Now, Electronic Arts, hire me already, its my 2nd year applying!
For what it's worth I don't think "Web 2.0" (and I detest that name) is all about enhancing things with new technology (even if a bunch of that technology enables stuff, even helpful stuff, that's not been possible without it - reorderable draggable lists, autocompleting, and so on).
Look at Flickr or Zooomr. *Anyone* could have created that even five years ago. It's not about new technology, it's about web people finally getting the web for themselves and doing their thing. The bubble was about conglomerates trying to shove the web into the mold of other medias, and on the other end of the chart it was about faulty business models (if "the new economy" meant that if two companies did jobs for each other worth $20 billion, they both earned $20 billion, then the stock market should have called bullshit on this from the very beginning).
I'm not saying some people aren't making the same mistakes all over again. It *is* starting to look like the bubble with startups all over the place, but unlike last time, some of the better successes of this era are companies *adjusting* to the web, embracing how it works and building on that. And some of the leaders of it are folks that have been doing just that all along - 37signals spring to mind.
Shouldn't it had been "Flikr KILLER below 18!"?
When I was 14 I was computing with an abacus. Later I went on to coding on a stone tablet with chisel and hammer, it was later labeled as the 10 commandments, but that's neither here nor there. I used to walk 10 miles in the snow each day to work in the mines.
I find it highly credible that a bright 17-year-old can hack together a system that does good metadata stuff to make it more hackable and more user-friendly - but scalability is harder to learn. You also need to be able to do the kind of social engineering that gets lots of people interested in your system, and other than dumb luck, that's a very very hard thing to do by yourself.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
17 year old creates Flickr killer!!! Isn't that better?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
So he spent, what, a month longer developing his site than the Flickr guys did? Hmmm, could be a lot more stable then. Nice work, kid.
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
Who thinks they could do this? Woah, everyone?
Not exactley impressive is it, if you did it for your dissertation you'd be lucky to get a 2:2.
As the guy above said, must be nice to have financial support.
... yup that pretty much confirms he's only 17.
So this is just for sharing photos which are totally irrelevant to the public, like most blogs? Great piece of creativity but it doesn't exactly solve a single real problem of the world.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Excuse my ignorance for US law, but he has ripped off flickr, used a similar name, and wants to profit from this.
Won't he be sued by Yahoo?
I Googled around for some stuff on BlueBridge and found out that they had a couple of PDFs lying around. It looks like some stuff from earlier projects, one being a Subway sandwich shop web site to order custom made subs. Anyway, just thought you might be interested.
e nt=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q= site%3Abbridgetech.com+filetype%3Apdf&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hs=akR&hl=en&lr=&cli
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
There was a kid in London, ON Canada (Keith Peiris) that started his own web design company at 11 years old. I believe he's around 18 years old today...
He received an assload of press. He met the Prime Minister. The youngest CEO in the world. He's been given awards from top companies (Macromedia).
Personally, I'm not a fan of his work... but that's just me. The kid is kicking some ass. He has done some NHL team web sites and many local and Canadian hockey-related web sites.
The problem with complicated data models is that they require effort on the part of the user to understand the model and use it effectively. Tags work because they're simple: a user can get the concept in a few seconds and then, for every item, tag it just as quickly by typing a few words into a box. You can't beat tags for simplicity. The more complicated you make the model, the higher the barrier to entry and thus the less input you will recieve. Since most of these "folksonomy"-like systems rely on a high number of submissions to filter out junk, this could greatly impact the quality of your data.
Of course, if you've got some clever trick up your sleeve to make your data model intuitive and quick to use then I'm all for it. Anything has to be better than keywords as a data model.
"You can choose to create an account or just use one of five other credentials to set up an account (Level9, OpenID, LiveJournal, Google (Gmail)"
:)
What does this mean? You use your existing gmail / livejournal login for this site? If so, how's he managed to get access to their authentication engine? Or is he just hoarding passwords
Haha, it wasn't a female that created it. HAHAHAHAHA.
Repeal the 19th ammendment.
Just curious... what did he write it in? PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.?
I was running the largest BBS resource online and had been for over a year. When I was 18 I built DtDNS (a dynamic DNS service that is now celebrating seven years in service). I'm sure we all have something special we were working on when we were that age, so, why is this news again? Perhaps I'm disgruntled because when I was 17 I was getting yelled at by my parents to quit wasting my time with "that computer crap" and to get outside and cut the grass. Now I make more money than they do, hehe.
... is that he followed through on a project.
Lots of people have ideas for things, but not many have the ability to follow through on things. Especially younger folks!
When I was about 12, I wrote about half of a BBS on my Apple II - it'd answer the phone, let a user log in, and I made maybe 5 or 6 very primitive discussion boards and a hangman game. Not a single bit of it was "innovative" in the large sense of the word, but I made it all from scratch and learned a hell of a lot from it. I stopped working on the project when my dad, thinking it would help inspire me, got me some commercial BBS product. I wound up getting demoralized - "Someone else already did it, and better than I could." (I wound up trying to write games - there were no worries about someone else "doing it first" since I wanted to "fix" Ultima III to add features [never succeeded, but I did manage to make a tile-based display that would let me move a guy around a map, make characters for a party, and sort-of fight])
Anyway - lots of people have ideas for really great stuff, but not a lot of them do anything about it. The fact that he made it work, did some pretty nice localization - that's good stuff even if it isn't entirely original/innovative.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
"Brand recognition though, you can't whip that out whenever you want."
It's easier if you unzip first.
There are thousands of people between the ages of 15-18 who are about to get introduced to the harsh world of patent law too. Consider it an education in how the "real world" works, the one where a rich established company can harrass you right out of existence with relative ease with a few legal threats.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you don't have the programming skills, but have ideas that would make good competition...where do you get started? Especially with web services development? Also, where's a good starting place to learn about the hosting you would need for something like this. I know there are cheap ways to host this much data and expensive ways, so does anybody know what kind of setup Flickr is using?
BTW, kudos to this kid, and since I saw he posted on here, I was wondering...do you know a lot of programming languages? Or did you just learn what was required for this project?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
WOW! Just read your past work -- you are a troll MASTER!! Keep up the amazing work!
http://www.wcools.nl/ Look at this guy, he wrote a complete OS at an younger age.
He might have created something that "works" like Flickr, but I really doubt it is scalable to thousands and thousands of _CONCURRENT_ users and terabytes of data!
23hq.com
Supports the flickr API, which seems like much bigger news than the age of the authors.
I do so love articles like this where they tell you nothing about what the heck it actually is and then the site doesn't work thanks to be slashdotted so you can't tell what the heck they are talking about...
This kid appears to have come upon a real Five Dollar Idea.
Anyone else want to call bubble on these web-apps? It seems like everyone and his kid brother nowadays has some kind of web-app to do something social but inane that makes a lot of ad money or gets bought by Google.
At 17, in 1985, I was chasing some seriously gorgeous skirt. ;) ...and making $5.10/hr washing dishes and loving life.
I just wanted to say that your sig-line reminds of something similar about statistics:
Statistics are like bikinis; what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
There's nothing preventing your OpenID server from using a SSL or TLS certificate in just the way you say your bank does. Zooomr's partner OpenID service MyOpenID does in fact just that.
We do highly discourage use of "a window with no location bar" for the reasons you mention. You and I will probably remember that when using the service, but it is a difficult user eduction issue, granted. It would help a lot if things like Petname Tool take off.
OpenID Enabled
In software it is fairly expensive to develop a concept, define requirements, build the prototype or first revision and encounter/resolve the issues. It is called the 'bleeding edge' for a good reason.
Once you have a product, the cost for someone else to build a work-alike is a fraction of what it cost you.
With such a low barrier to competition, it can be a real problem trying to make money from a first product. Your only safety is to try and stay one step ahead of the mimickers by innovating your product and serving a niche market.
They expalined this on TLC, 9/11: Anatomy of a Disaster. The trusses that support the building were not heat trated, and were designed to distribute almost all the weight around the outer structure. When the trusses on the floors that sustained damage gave way, the shock on the trusses beneath, already weakened by heat, floor after floor failed.
I was very interested in this when I first saw it, because I too noticed the collapse looked like that kind of planned destruction.
in your post.
Oh, and get off my lawn!
Man, you really need that seminar!
Programming is hard, there's no question. There's only one thing harder: figuring out a new and unique thing to program.
In other words, I'm impressed by his ability to code well (presumably) in a short time, but would be a heck of a lot more impressed if he had created something unique (such as the original Flickr, or whatever it is that was the original in that field) in twice the time.
uhhh...down?
No, he said "symmetrical". "Down" is already implied by the verb "fell".
Nice reading comprehension skills there, dude.
He was making a joke.
Nice humor comprehension skills there, dude.
. . . original namr.
Why yes, yes I do have uhhh...ummm.......want to go ride bikes?
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All the static links point to the coral cache service at nyud.net.
If I were the admin, I wouldn't mirror those images for him.