The new r-experience
I have stumbled upon a new interesting website today: beta.zooomr.com
zooomr is basically another photo sharing service like flickr, picasa, or kodakgallery (there’s plenty of them!).
To be honest, it is suspiciously similar to flickr! It offers almost the same features and it has a quite similar interface. I think they might be using the same frameworks, at least on the javascript side, as some parts of the interface are identical (text editing, notes, tag editing…).
I looked for any connection to flickr or Yahoo, but it seems that this is an independent project, with three developers (leaded by Kristopher Tate) and Wendell Davis III as interim CEO (google his name and you will find out that he is not a newcomer).
zooomr introduces some nice features that are missing (or less useful) in flickr (but the latter has a far better web design IMHO 
Here is a brief list:
- Overlay icons on each thumbnail can either display information or allow users to perform some common actions, like marking a picture as a favourite or open the picture in a “lightbox”. The same information is shown and the same tasks can be performed from standard “controls” (just like in flickr) when showing a bigger version of the photo.
- Lightbox. As I mentioned above, you can preview the photo in a light frame that will pop up in the page using javascript, without the need to load the whole page for the photo and without loosing the page you are currently viewing.
- Near-by: an overlay icon and a small map in the photo page show near photos (for geotagged photos only, of course). Flickr’s geographical information lacks of more integration with the website and there’s no easy way to show near photos: you have to visit the map to see photos taken in a specific area. zooomr’s popup map also adds some interesting thumbnails to the marks visible on the map.
- Geotagging photos seems to be quite easier. Once you are on a map, you can select a point and start geotagging pictures taken in that area.
- Portals: this is a funny feature. Maybe not so useful, but sure funny. You can select a part of your photo, just like with notes, and assign another photo to that area. Hovering the portal will popup a small thumbnail with a (somehow scrollable!) preview of the linked photo. Click it and you will be “entering the portal” to that photo.
- Portraits: just like notes and portals, you can link an area of a photo to another zooomr member. The most popular zoomr members can be seen on a special page.
- Recent activity timeline. The “Recent Activity” page should be similar to the flickr feature but it displays a nice javascript powered timeline. I had no way to test it but it seems a nice alternative.
- zooomrtations: I could not test this feature either, but I suppose you can assign a sound file to a photo.
Well, that’s all I suppose. A very nice website, IMHO. It’s still beta, I really hope they will change it’s look and there’s still some important features missing, first off, flickr’s great “interestingness”.
I just hope Yahoo! won’t sue them because they look too similar to flickr