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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.
At this risk of completely blowing up his server, here is a testing version of his site: http://beta.zooomr.com/
If it helps, I don't think you're special either.
Out of curiousity how did you get around child labor laws to work as a nonagricultural worker at 14?
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 &
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.
building 7 fell in exactly the same exactly symmetrical way as WTC 1 and 2
uhhh...down?
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.
:P ). Currently i'm working with an MVC framework for PHP that I designed myself. I work in an e-business company.
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
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.
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? :-)
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.
When I was ten, to reboot the computer you held it upside down over your head and shook it. Oh wait, that was 'Etch-a-Sketch'. Holy crap, how times have changed!
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I started BlueBridge Technologies Group close to 5 years ago. The name comes from the blue underbelly of the Coronado Bridge in San Diego, California.
I'm working at Meetro right now so that I have a chance at living in the Bay Area. That aside, Zooomr is a solution of BlueBridge Technologies Group and is in the midst of becoming incorporated.
Just so I can get this in without having to post multiple times, I am in-fact 17 years old.
Kristopher Tate
cto & founder -- bluebridge tech / zooomr
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)
... 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.