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."
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!!
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.
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/
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 &
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"
Holy shit. Nice non sequitur there! Got ADD much? :-)
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.
Did Google open up some kind of authentication API while I was sleeping?
It looks like it's entirely bogus - you enter your gmail account and it emails you a password each time you want to access the site. You recover the password, enter it on the site, and that's your logon. Not really sure what it has to do with gmail, as the same mechanism could apply to any email address.
Sounds pretty bogus.
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.
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
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.
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^)/
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.
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!
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.
... 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.
23hq.com
Supports the flickr API, which seems like much bigger news than the age of the authors.