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."

Comments

Awesome, but not so unique

[Kickboy12]

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.

Re:Awesome, but not so unique

[forkazoo]

Indeed, many people have made similar technological things. I count myself among them. By 18, I was working at a small local phone company, running their website. A ton of money was probably made from the orders that went through the site. But, it wasn't especially glamorous. It was like any other "E-commerce" site at the time, really. And, the company wasn't about to advertise the fact that their tech staff was extremely inexperienced.

So, I won't bow down to this kid from a technological standpoint.

But, shit. He did his own thing, and he managed to get the word out about it. My hat is off to him as a self promoter. Nobody ever heard of me, so he pretty much has me beat from that angle... Even if his website is dead.

Lots of guys like me and the parent poster have a reasonable amount of skill with technology, and did so at a rather young age. We all had neat ideas. He made his idea. That deserves respect. My real time strategy game, for example, still only exists as notes on scrap paper, and the start of a header file for a prototype...

Re:Awesome, but not so unique

[woolio]

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.

I'm not sure this kid getting notice is a good thing for him...

I'm not sure how fortunate he will be. If Ebay can get sued for the "Buy It Now" feature, how long will it be until Flickr [or another compnay] sues the 17yr-old for patent infringement? [Or maybe they will wait until he turns 18]

That is, when his thing takes off and starts to compete, I can see Flickr sueing him into smitherenes. [I didn't read the article:] And since he probably hasn't taken the necessary steps to hide behind his own cooperation, this kid will be paying for more than just college loans...

Re:Awesome, but not so unique

[Omaze]

I work(ed) around many wealthy families at my previous employer. In the 40s the trend for parents to bluster about their kids was the military. In the 50s and 60s the trend was the football team. In the 70s, 80s, and early 90s it was all about which colleges they could get into and the size of the family SUV. In the last part of the 90s and into the 00s it seems that the parents are one-upping each other with what sort of business ventures their children can get into. The people I worked with had children as young as 15 who were: movie producers (with offers from major studios), MMORPG game writers (with offers from game producers), day traders (to the tune of tens of thousands in profit), and database consultants (with small company contracts). The bottom line was, though, none of those kids could have even come close to doing what they did without the several thousand dollars' investment from their parents and the parents' willingness to stand back and give the kids room to pursue the ideas rather than hounding them to get some part time job at the local restaraunt.

I don't mean to take away from the fellow who's created Zoomr. More power to him and my hat's off to him. Let's stop short of automatically giving him an adult measure of respect, though. He wouldn't have been able to do what he did if he'd been spending his 5 evenings/week after school bagging groceries. Let's not start flogging ourselves remorsefully over wasted youth. The bottom line is opportunity--which most of us never really have.

Re:Competition is nice, but . . .

[eobanb]

I feel like Zooomr's use of OpenID alone is reason to celebrate. I mean so far OpenID has been used by, uhm, LiveJournal...and that's just about it. It's a really underrated technology.

i18n is cool, but easy

[Anthony Boyd]

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.

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.

Re:Anything is possible when you turn off the TV

[humankind]

I was doing a lot of subcontracting when I was younger. When I was working for the Fortune 500 company, my father got me that job and he handled it all. So I know nothing about what the law was at that time. However, when I was younger and working, people didn't seem to care about my age except they were concerned I was so young I wouldn't be responsible enough to work on something so important to their business... so I had to be that much more dilligent.

Someone modded my post a "troll". That's really sad. I know there are people here who are big gamer fans and I didn't mean to malign those who like to obsess over sitcoms and shit like that. It's just not what I did, and I honestly think if my parents hadn't made an effort to not expose me to much TV during formative years, I wouldn't have had the skillset I have now. I'm very grateful to them for it. Some here, apparently resent it, but that's not my fault. I'm only trying to empower others, and not really brag about myself... I'm just saying, you can do what this kid has done; I know because I did stuff like what he's doing too. You just have to use your time and energy more wisely. I don't think playing Halo several hours a day is going to get you a great job... your milage may vary... but don't take it out on me.

Re:Anything is possible when you turn off the TV

[Spy der Mann]

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.

I think I got your idea, but you didn't quite hit the nail on the head. See, I had cable TV and i've been enjoying videogames since I was a kid. But I learned to program nifty stuff like you, and I cracked my first videogame when I was 12. By 18 I cracked my first shareware app (curse those register screens :P ). Currently i'm working with an MVC framework for PHP that I designed myself. I work in an e-business company.

I really don't think having videogames or cable TV will make a difference. What really matters is the education and the interest in Science that you're raised with.

See, my dad always bought me science books when I was a kid. Science for kids, that is, with nifty graphics and all that. I really have to say his effort was worth it.

About your talent, I really think you're a gifted individual, there are people who even with good circumstances around them, have trouble learning to program a "hello world". A potential problem with gifted people is that if they don't recognize their gifts, they might end up judging others too harshly, crushing their own self-esteem. Don't make that mistake.

Re:pr0n

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Actually, I am working on this problem. But instead of a lame tag-based system, I've opted for a strict relational model.

Each picture consists of one or more actions.
Each action consists of of exactly two people (both of which can point to the same person record).
Each person record is broken up into "static" (things unchanging throughout their life, e.g. birth name), "daily" (things true for a short period of time, e.g. color her hair was dyed that week), and "instant" (things only true for that split second the photo was taken).

The data model is much more complete than this, and more importantly, I've found a way to actually collect the metadata.

Let people in for free. Have them go through a custom webapp, collecting the metadata (clicking on the photo with the mouse, to grab the pixel color value for skintone), maybe as few as just a few pictures a week. In exchange, they get to search for free.

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.

Like I said, you wouldn't believe just how much metadata I figure it's possible to collect.

Anyone want a free account?

Some interesting PDFs on the BlueBridge site

[Corrado]

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.

http://www.google.com/search?hs=akR&hl=en&lr=&clie nt=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q= site%3Abbridgetech.com+filetype%3Apdf&btnG=Search