Media center and digital photography extraordinaire Thomas Hawk (pen name) is going to work for Flickr competitor Zooomr.

I was a bit surprised by this announcement as I’d always assumed Hawk was happily employed offline and merely doing the blogging and photography thing as a (passionate) hobby. His nom de plume primarily a ruse to throw off the scent of his real job (financial services, I think?), something completely unrelated. Not surprising, however, is what type of job he would be taking online. He joins Scoble, who tipped me off to Hawk’s flightpath, as leaving something established and secure for the great unknown startup.

Let’s keep it real here, neither PodTech.net or Zooomr sound like all that exciting gigs. The first isn’t even a dot com and the second is plagued with facing strong competition in the field and an extra ‘o’ in its name (misspellings and non-dotcoms are a bane for domains and users trying to remember/type them in, search, etc). I’m holding my breath and wishing both Hawk and Scoble well in their new endeavors. Great risks = great potential rewards. These moves will be seen as either brillliant or idiotic over the next 12-36 months. Hopefully neither has burned any bridges with their respective moves. Just. In. Case.

Hawk explains why Zoomr isn’t simply a Flickr clone:

And wile some might label Zooomr a mere flickr clone, Zooomr has nonetheless been busy building a whole host of features that Flickr does not have today. Photo trackbacks (to answer that perpetual question, “why is my photo getting 500 views?”), audio annotation, rich map integration and geotagging. And it’s only getting better from there. Wait until you see what they have in store for the future.

Sounds intriguing. This is what both Scoble and Hawk can do for their respective companies: tell the rest of us why we should care. Scoble is off to a promising start, even though he’s not officially working at PodTech yet (his gig starts next month) with a list of things that make PodTech boring and corporate. Go get ‘em.

How will these two companies products/services make our lives better? More enjoyable, entertaining and save us time either in addition or in exchange for what we’re currently using. If they can do these things making a change from or adding to what has become familiar is less disruptive and more sensible. The early adopter types like me are much easier to attract than mainstream America. However, I’d say we’re more dififcult to impress, please and keep.

Interestingly enough toward the end of his post Hawk labels Zooomr an “additive” to Flickr, not a replacement.

Multiple registration options
In my case, Zooomr is neither since I couldn’t get past the clumsy registration screen (pictured above). Seems like Zooomr is attempting to use some master user/pass gateway sort of like Passport does and unfortunately it works even less as well in its current state than Passport. No matter what I attemped to use it kept telling me “Unable to find openid server for identity url.” Tried various username variations with same results. Either it is broken, I am, or some combination. Before fixing the extra ‘o’ I’d recommend fixing this closed door.

But wait! If you look at the screenshot at the top of this post you’ll see that indeed I was successful in registering. And now begins part two of this post: first look.

There are alternate Zooomr login options available: Level9, LiveJournal™, Google™ or Meetro. This time, I chose Google and had Zooomr send me a Tpass (temporary pass) which it dispatched quickly to my Gmail address. From there I returned to the login screen linked in this paragraph and successfully created my account. For those with Gmail accounts, I’d strongly suggest going this route.

Once the account is created you end up at a screen that looks like the one at the top of this post, the WelcomeMat, and you can begin customizing your profile and uploading pics and creating your “once in a lifetime” permanent URL. Since I didn’t forever want to be in Zooomr as “gmail_tdavid” I chose “tdavid” instead.

What are the first pictures I uploaded? The screenshots in this post, tagged as Zooomr. Recently there was a bit of controversy around Flickr and Not In Public Site Areas (NIPSA) for non-photographic images. I’m curious if Zooomr has a similar anti-user “rule” handcuffing non-photographic images? Will find out.

Zooomr account limits
- Free Zooomr accounts receive unlimited photo storage and 50 MB upload limit. For each person you refer who successfully signs up you get an additional 1 MB. However, it’s not very clear how to actually refer people, maybe Hawk can stop by and explain this one?
- Zooomr is said to allow the following formats: .jpg, .png, .pdf, small .psd’s, and small .tiff’s but I was also able to upload .gif, so perhaps the Help/FAQ page needs updating. It also wrongly says there are only three login options (Google isn’t mentioned).
- comments on each pic are allowed, just like Flickr.
- RSS 2.0 feeds for tags and recent pictures are provided
- a feature called grids which “let you see related tags for a grid.” The example given is the tag ‘California’ would show ‘San Francisco.’ I wonder if ‘Zooomr’ shows ‘Flickr’?
- there is a picture trackback feature but just like the referral it’s kind of unclear how this works (is this automatic? Special trackback required, what?)

How does Zooomr compare to Flickr?
Since Zooomr is still in beta it seems kind of unfair to compare the two at this point, but I will say Hawk and company have significant work to do to make this service more compelling, particularly:

- The multiple-login/registration thing which is currently more confusing than convenient, especially when it defaults to openid (what readers here actually use openid for anything?).
- The help/FAQ page needs, well, help. When a brand new member can find inaccuracies and missing information that’s not good. This is probably a sign of changes being made to the service and not being updated in the help/FAQ page.
- Zooomr’s blog is formatted for PDA, not web. Great if you are on a PDA but as I write this, I’m not. Multiple stylesheets needed. If we’re on the web, don’t jam us inside some tiny width window.

It took Flickr a year or so to get out of beta [see Hmm Flickr review 7/21/2004], so Zoomr has miles to go before they sleep. I was nowhere near as impressed with Zooomr the first time as I was with Flickr, which I gave a B+. If Zooomr is truly intended to be an additive to Flickr then at least I’m not seeing where, why or how this would make much sense in its current incarnation. Hawk says there is a version 2.0 coming up (a version 2.0 before leaving beta?). Perhaps that very important question — why should we care? — and all my other questions above will be answered with this pending upgrade.

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