Zooomr will be releasing its new version, “Mark III” in the next few hours. For the uninitiated its a photosharing web application courtesy of Kristopher Tate and Thomas Hawk. One of the things that I love about Zooomr is how fast it was, how much space they gave out (in the several-gigabyte range in the prior Mark), and how many nerdy photography features it was trying to pack into one space. With Mark III they aim to continue many of these trends and much, much more.

In particular, they’re offering two important features

• Unlimited Storage — while you’re paying how much for how much space at that other place?
• Marketplace – users will be able to sell their photos and keep 90% of the sale

The official launch will be heading out within the next 12-24 hours, but Kris has released a “Launch Video” that shows a lot of the newer features.

Which is over here at Vimeo:: Zooomr Mark III Launch Demo! from Kristopher on Vimeo

Unfortunately it isn’t really annotated so here are some notes that I took that might help it go down a little easier

• Logins: You can now login with a proper email / password process that is familiar to everyone — in addition to openID
• Smart Search: you can search with some unusual features like “most awesome” and “near location” (such as “near starbucks”)
• World Through Photos: this is a feature that Kris spent a *lot* of time talking about, in that you’ll be able to use a mashup of GoogleMaps to search for place names, using their proper names. For example, hitting in “Eiffel Tower” will take you to where it is on GoogleMaps (and presumably some photos as well)
• Discover: Best Hundred — you can discover the best one hundred photos over a given time period, whether it be over the past year, past month or what have you at a glance
• Groups: Think Google groups, but centered around photos, allowing you to create messages and what not around specific photos.
• You: There a lot of slick Ajax to create a rich user interface with respect to viewing your own photos and profile
• Widgets Within Photos: Even though Kris demonstrated this, I still had a hard time understanding what he meant — perhaps that you would be able to syndicate information *within* photos through different media as widgets, such as tags, and so on. In fact …
• People Tagging: You can tag people in photos, like what is already offered in Facebook, and then send a message to them about the photo that you took … a viral feature for photos.
• Instantaneous search: Through the magic of Ajax, things look fast without loading times
• Marketplace: Kris didn’t share to many details other than it will be easy, you can charge ridiculous amounts (if the market will bear it), and there’s 90% share for users
• Comments / Messaging / Dialogue: There is a sophisticated messaging system for each photograph allowing you to have a conversation with different people underneath each photograph — it will also let the photographer know so as to include him the conversation:
• Search by color / palette: You can add in hexadecimal colors to search for different photos
• Portals: Creating a photographic link to another photograph on someone else’s photograph (a “portal”)
• Zipline: You’ll be able to see at a glance, and in reverse chronological order what your friends are doing, saying, and their photos

It looks like a fairly awesome product so I’m really looking forward to it as it looks to be entirely free. There are over 250 new features as well.

Watching the video, it looks like there are three big themes involved with Zooomr Mark III:

1. Context — being able to place photographs in context, with respect to who shot them, why they shot them, and having conversations around them
2. Network — Zooomr really looks to create a real social network for photographers and their photographs, coupled with messaging, profiles, and an easy way to share their love for this hobby
3. Rich Interface – Ajax is used aplenty to create a rich environment with quick loading times, eye catching animation and a whole lot more

Anyway, with the official release its something we’ll be able to see all for ourselves. Congratulations Kris and Thomas — this looks like one helluva product!