Technology Can Be Cruel

Last night, after months of hard work, Zooomr Mark 3 launched.

Kris Tate’s been working all week under the scrutiny of the community via a webcast at Ustream.tv to try to get the site launched. After a server crash earlier in the week things were looking good. At one point I suggested I was going to go to bed and Kris insisted that I stay up; I’d been there all night, he wanted me to see the launch. His enthusiasm and passion at that moment, minutes before he knew he’d be in a position to launch Zooomr, was a joy to see.

A few hours later, Zooomr launched. I wasn’t around to see it, but for about fifteen minutes the site was online and from what I hear, things were looking great.

And then…their database server died. You can see Kris’s broadcast from their server room here. It looks like their RAID controller has died. They don’t have any spare hardware, or massive amounts of fault tolerant equipment, because they’re just two guys trying to create an awesome site.

Kris’s desperately trying to remain optimistic in that video, but the difference between him here, and when he realised he was going to be able to launch are night and day.

What Zooomr now need are servers. Scoble’s put the word out, and Kris has asked everyone to blog about their predicament. I’d echo what Scoble’s got to say: this is a great opportunity for someone to get some positive PR. He mentioned last night that he was trying to convince Sun to give Zooomr some Blade servers. In the grand scheme of things, a few Blades from Sun isn’t going to cost them very much and in the eyes of the Zooomr community, and potentially the rest of the online community, it would be a great PR move.

It would make all the difference to Kris right now.

So, come on someone: be a hero. Save the photo-sharing site, save the world?

Zooomr Chat: The Links!

Over at the Zooomr.tv chat room (where all the cool, and mildly compulsive obsessive kids hang out) Thomas Hawk just asked for a set of blog links. I posted mine (natch) but here are the others:

Bryan, Nik, Girl-InChoate, Phill, Er… , Yup, Ben, Georg, AcmePhoto, Jim, DB, Thomas

So there we go. FYI: Zooomr hasn’t launched yet, but it will do. Soon.

Quick Bite: Gmail

This is very cool. As is this. Hopefully I can harness the awesome power of these two links and clean up the sewer that is my Gmail mailbox…

Tidying Up Gmail

While I wait for Zooomr to launch, I thought I’d see if I can make my Gmail inbox a nicer place to be.

A quick Google search later, and I’ve got some hints and tips to look at. One of which is “Use a search term like ‘before:2007/01/01 label:sent’ to find everything before a certain date”. Which is great - I could destroy all mail before the beginning of this year. But that’s not really what Gmail is about, is it?

I’m currently using half of Gmail’s limit, so I’m not in danger of running out of space, but despite that it pains me to see such an untidy repository. I’d like to purge all the crap I don’t need, but I don’t know how best to sort the crap from the things I want to hold on to. I’d quite like to create a Google Apps for Domains Premiere account and use that, but there’s no client-based mobile access for GAfD. Yet.

I think I’m just going to have to start deleting anything I don’t want as it comes in, but be lenient with the “don’t want” classification. I just don’t seem to be able to find an ideal way to tidy up Gmail…

Zooomr Mk3 is coming…

Given that Flickr are not on my Christmas card list at the moment (more on that later), my thoughts turn back to Zooomr. I like the idea of Zooomr, but it always looked a little…um…nasty…

All that is about to change. Mk3 is about to launch. I’ve just been watching a live video of Kristopher and (I think) Thomas in the build up to Zooomr’s launch. I’ve wished them good luck with the launch (how cool is that? I can actually wish them luck using the power of the interwebs) and now I’m going to go to bed.

When I wake up, I hope the face of Internet photo sharing has been changed forever. Kristopher seems to think it will, and the demonstration video on their site certainly looks massively impressive.

So, in the morning, we shall see. Maybe I’ll be uploading my son’s second birthday photos to Zooomr, and not Flickr…

More 2.2 “Issues”

I’ve just noticed, while making that last post, that the 2.2 has killed the “default category” functionality, and that clicking “publish” didn’t actually publish my post. I wonder if this will have the same problem.

Edit: Nope, this one published OK. Maybe it’s something to do with the autosave? Grr…