blusb.eu

Today I noticed that Yahoo! Maps increased their resolution for Great Britain. This is great for flickr too, but I had to re-tag my photos in flickr since 99% of them were not correctly geotagged.

Here is a screenshot of my map!

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Thomas Hawk unofficially announced (in a flickr forum) the plans of zooomr to launch what they call ZMarketplace.

“We are going to sell Pro accounts and the monetization strategy that I’m most excited about is that we are going to set up something called ZMarketplace where we allow users on an opt in basis to offer some of their work for sale. This might take the form of a fine art photography book by a user or their fine art prints and it will also include our establishing a stock photography agency to be made available for our users.”

The post can be found here.

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Zooomr is back online according to their post here!

The service was down due to a RAID controller failure which also resulted to partial data loss. Images uploaded by the users in the last few days are gone while other images are corrupted. From now on I think zooomr will invest some more to reliability since another incident like that will be disastrous. I know people are all good and saying these things can happen and blah blah blah, but these are thoughts of zooomr enthusiasts (who got free PRO accounts) and not users. Reliability is a major concern to paying customers and if zooomr is going to leave the beta stage it has to do address the reliability issues (I know the truth is bitter but it is the truth).

However (in my opinion), zooomr handled the incident well and upgraded all enthusiast’s PRO accounts to PRO 4 Life to regain user’s trust. This compensates the downtime and data loss. Users know will forget the incident happy!

Question to me now is “where zooomr is going to get its profits from?” I believe the plan was to give bloggers free PRO accounts to gain publicity and a year later convert these PRO users to happily paying customers. Now with PRO 4 Life things change soooo much. On a second thought, you could argue that the upgrade is a way to gain publicity too; not intended of course. Zooomr compensates with the upgrade and that is called customer service. Yeah it did slip but payed its price!

Let’s see how the story goes in the coming months.

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Zooomr is down since yesterday (1, 2, 3, 4), and they blame it on a hardware failure. Kristopher Tate was working till 4am yesterday, according to Thomas Hawk. I know these things can happen. However, they can happen only to a company where the number of employees is =1 (Kristopher). I guess they do not want to hire anybody to save some bucks but when your company’s reputation is on the line you should hire someone, unless you are thinking that nobody out there is smart enough to be part of your company. Finally, from what I understood zooomr has the “farm” servers in the basement of its offices/home. Get a professional hosting space I guess you will increase the reliability. Use RAID and then you will not have to recover from backups. (UPDATE: Ignore this part . It was my misunderstanding as Kristopher pointed out! Zooomr has a co-located facility.)
The recipe to see your reputation going downhill is:

• give bloggers free pro accounts
• a downtime (hardware failure)

Simple! Now all the images hosted in zooomr for all the blogs around the globe will show this:

AAAhhh! Something else look at the comment made by tim. Kristopher is working to setup a new downtime page? This is going to last LOOOOOONG. You dudes should be repairing the fault not changing the downtime page eh?

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