Deep Jive Interests

So, with a tad of fanfare, Zooomr announced that it was offering free upgrades to all “pro” accounts on November 1st.

How deliciously awesome was this?

Well, principally because they’re allowing bloggers of all stripes to become “pro” in their accounts for FREE.

Secondly, the “upgrade” involves bumping up the transfer limit to 4 gigs / month of absolute web2.0 picture-y flickr kickass-edly goodness that, quite frankly, I still giggle at when my wife isn’t looking.

I have to confess — in spite of my inclination to try most things web2.0, I’ve never tried Flickr to any extent.  Not because of its UI sucks, or that it functionally doesn’t work or anything of the sort.

Its because the restrictions on its free accounts are virtually ridiculous, bordering on being personally insulting.

20Mb per month? Are you kidding?

For someone interested in using Flickr as a serious photosharing service who has more than a passing interest in photos, I’m interested in uploading a few photoalbums.

Plural.

Lots of photos.

I expect that most people who enjoy photos are in the same boat.

One day of wedding photos might include more than a hundred photos for me; I like my photos “high res” — which are in excess of 1 megabyte/ photo (not really “high resolution” at all)
The result? I can’t even upload a single “album” for the whole month!

What’s even more baffling? The parent company “Yahoo” also has photo albums — no surprise — but there is no bandwidth or storage limits at all!

Four gigabytes per month seems like a more realistic feel for what I need to flex its app “muscles” — and Zoomr needs to be congratulated on it and the strategy for granting bloggers a free go at trying it out. It creates free “buzz”, and quite frankly, its a great little application.

Anyway, here are the ups and the not-so-ups:

The ups:

1. Its fast – real fast.

2. It has loads of features that seem to be growing all the time — geotracking, zoomrtations, “recent activity”, and trackbacks (trackbacks!)

3. The transfer limit is giga-alicious!

There were a few things that I think may get in the way of it finding larger acceptance however. For example, I could see my mom having a hard time with the following things:

1. mildly confusing signup — what’s with forcing people to use OpenID? Moreover, everytime you sign in again, you’ll have to sign in through the OpenID system. I’m not sure if non-geeks will understand the concept or it will provide another barrier that newer users will have to hop over [and for some reason I just can't get the merge thing to work with gmail!]

2. mildly confusing mass uploading tool — jUploadr is a useful script that allows you to upload boatloads of photos easily; but for its also used for Flickr. And for some reason, it defaults to uploading to Flickr, so it bafflingly, when you try and install it, sends you to the Flickr website (well, that was my experience anyway)

3. smart sets != albums — but its close! The whole concept of “tagging” isn’t quite yet intuitive when I tried to explain it to her in the context of creating albums (“Why can’t I just create an “album” and them move my pictures in there?”); secondly, although I’m sure the feature’s coming — its difficult to mass-tag things once they’re actually in your account. Without that feature, its difficult to built “smart” sets easily … and consequently “show” your albums.

4. the absence of any real faq – hey, its a beta I know, but just so you know … there’s no faq.

Zooomr is still in beta for a reason, but its bandwidth limits make a ton of sense for me, and its something that I will continue to use for a while to come. Its extra cool for geeks — and I’m sure they’ll be working on other things to smooth out the wrinkles in the future.

Flickr … still baffling to me.

PS: my own limited Zoomr public account: http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/tonyhung