Zooomr: yet another photo-sharing service

[skyfaller]

Perhaps I shouldn't get excited over new web 2.0 services, since as Asheesh points out they're proprietary and you have no control over them. That said, if you're using web services like Flickr, it's good to have accounts on competing services so that if they suddenly turn evil for some reason you can switch to someone else without too much trouble.

In that spirit, I'm trying out this Flickr clone, Zooomr, which is apparently giving out pro accounts to people who blog about it in an attempt to boost their userbase. I guess it worked for me ^_^

One thing that's cool about Zooomr is that you don't even need to sign up to get a free account... if you have a Livejournal account or a Google account, you already have a sign-in for Zooomr. I wish more services would use OpenID or something like it (I'm told OpenID has its flaws), it's fun and easy ^_^

Comments

[danielle5985.livejournal.com]

could you imagine a world in which the code backing web 2.0 services became open source? you would have a million variants of essentially the same application, inconsistencies in design, and webmasters who don't know enough about javascript, xml, and server side scripting to provide reputable services.

i'd really rather see more services open up their APIs for large-scale manipulation, have a more transparent architecture, serve over a variety of protocols, and support more languages. that way, you could have control over the services, but it would all be centralized. sort of.

[skyfaller]

Erm, Livejournal is open source, and it hasn't been a disaster... it's resulted in Deadjournal and Greaterjournal and local installations at some colleges, and it means that if Livejournal ever turns evil we can all walk away, which is a good thing.

As for imagining a world in which all web 2.0 services were open source, check out http://www.ning.com/ which lets you "create and share your own social web apps". If all web 2.0 services were open source it would be easy to mash them up into even cooler services. Naturally, good APIs are almost as useful and even more useful in some circumstances. The main problem is that someone else has control over all of your data. For some applications, it would be better to have your own server that you had control over.