Slashdot Mirror
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."
Competition is nice, but innovation is far more impressive.
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??
More likely: he sells to Google, which lost the buying-war for Flickr to Yahoo and is probably looking for a Flickr-competitor to work with Picasa, Hello, and Blogger. This thing has "acquire me" written all over it.
It's not the software google wanted to buy, but the name and the userbase. I mean really, it's a website that lets you post pictures and make comments about them. A blog with pictures.
The company that makes one of the most advanced search engines in the world could surely duplicate such software, and get it done quickly.
Brand recognition though, you can't whip that out whenever you want.
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.
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.
Good i18n and l10n is quite difficult and expensive.
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?
... 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.
Your post was modded troll because it's self-aggrandizing, impossible to verify, and falsely humble. You must know that your single anecdote proves no substantial point about the effect of mass media on children in general, so it could be inferred that the only reason you posted it was to talk about yourself.
If you had rigorously collected and analyzed data comparing TV to non-TV kids, that would be an insightful or informative post.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think you're totally unqualified to talk about opportunities for underage professionals without connections. Connections are more valuable than experience, education or even skill.
People get bitter when they hear stories like yours because they're the guys and girls with the CS degree who wind up working in tech support while some bigwig's kid causes them grief with buggy software. When they were that age, they were lucky to get a job at Burger King... and it's not because they didn't use their time more wisely.
Take all the advantages your parents give you, and never be ashamed of that, but never look down on people because they didn't succeed at jobs you didn't even get on your own.