I’m spending the evening with Thomas Hawk learning about the photo world. He’s one of the most talented photographers I’ve seen, so wanted to follow him around as he took photos. Tonight we spent a few hours underneath the Golden Gate bridge. He’ll have some of the photos up later.
He’s the kind of evangelist I hoped I would be: an authority on everything photo. Including all of his competitors like Flickr, Picasa, Smug Mug, Riya, Tabblo, Vizrea, Web Shots, Photo Bucket, FotoLog, and others.
He works for Zooomr (three “o”s), but his regularly posts photos to Flickr and other sites. He knows, for instance, that photographers will get more traffic from Google Images than other image search sites (he tries to get his photos listed on them all).
We started talking about Zooomr, which is developed by a single person (Kristopher Tate) and I asked him why he joined up with Kristopher. The answer: because Kristopher added a feature (trackbacks) in one hour when other photo sharing sites wouldn’t do it after months of begging (they still don’t have trackbacks).
Their latest feature? Photo portal notes. Coming tomorrow. Thomas tells me that feature didn’t exist on any planning board before last Friday (Kristopher thought it up on the way to the TechCrunch party last Friday).
Anyway, Thomas told me that he knows developers at all the photo sharing sites and that they tell him that their main problems are keeping up with the huge increases in traffic (doubling small numbers isn’t that hard to keep up with, but when you double millions of users that’s a HUGE problem to work around).
So, it’s very easy right now for Kristopher to add new features, but he hasn’t hit that scaling wall that’ll keep him busy adding servers and building a team to deal with data centers.
Anyway, thanks Thomas for the great photo walk and an insight into your creative process.
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