17 Year Old Creates Flickr Competitor

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has an article up on a new Flickr competitor called Zooomr. The interesting thing about all of this that it was developed in only three months by a 17 year old and to top it all off, the site is currently localized in 16 languages."

Alternative link

[Blazeix]

At this risk of completely blowing up his server, here is a testing version of his site: http://beta.zooomr.com/ [zooomr.com]

Re:Alternative link

[eobanb]

Actually beta.zooomr.com IS the site. Zooomr.com has just always redirected there.

Imageshack is the best

[zymano]

Imageshack [imageshack.us] doesn't use the annoying sign up forms.

If you need to show something fast and don't want the hassle then Imageshack [imageshack.us] is it.

I use it all the time. Fast and covenient.

Re:Google ID?

[ergo98]

Did Google open up some kind of authentication API while I was sleeping?

It looks like it's entirely bogus - you enter your gmail account and it emails you a password each time you want to access the site. You recover the password, enter it on the site, and that's your logon. Not really sure what it has to do with gmail, as the same mechanism could apply to any email address.

Sounds pretty bogus.

Re:is this a PR stunt?

[kristophertate]

I started BlueBridge Technologies Group [bbridgetech.com] close to 5 years ago. The name comes from the blue underbelly of the Coronado Bridge in San Diego, California.

I'm working at Meetro right now so that I have a chance at living in the Bay Area. That aside, Zooomr is a solution of BlueBridge Technologies Group and is in the midst of becoming incorporated.

Just so I can get this in without having to post multiple times, I am in-fact 17 years old.

Kristopher Tate
cto & founder -- bluebridge tech / zooomr

Re: i18n is cool, but easy

[gidds]

True. Even the straight language translation can be very tricky, unless you have a feeling for languages and coded the whole thing with translation in mind.

For example, I was working on some fairly complicated validation, which could result in a wide range of messages of the form "You can't [do some action] because [some field] is [too high|too low|zero|non-zero|etc.]" or "You can't [do some other action] because [some other condition]". My first attempt localised the strings for each bracketed bit separately; this was nice and neat, avoided repetition, kept the code short, and it looked like there was little to translate.

Trouble is, I was thinking in English grammar; I gather some languages simply wouldn't fit into that scheme. So we ended up translating full messages, which means we need to store each combination separately: the code is much longer, and there are many many more strings to translate; but it does mean that each language has each error message in the most natural, grammatical form.

I'm sure there are many other language gotchas, too. And of course there are the obvious issues with number formats, timezones, calendars...

Why zooomer but not 23?

[adamjudson]

23hq.com

Supports the flickr API, which seems like much bigger news than the age of the authors.

Re:Competition is nice, but . . .

[CoughDropAddict]

Believe me, I've read that, and I understand that it's not a trust system. Unlike the gp poster, I understand the difference between authentication and authorization. gp claimed that "OpenID has no authentication or integrity checking," which is clearly false.

People like gp read something like "This is not a trust system" and take that to mean "this is a weak system, that you should not trust." They don't expend the mental energy to actually understand what that means, and instead go parroting around that "OpenID is very weak for an authentication system."

It's people like that who make it necessary to write press releases that dress up real technical content with fluff like "OpenID uses state-of-the-art SHA1 encryption technology to provide a bulletproof way to keep your identity safe."

Just because someone shows you a drivers license, you don't trust them with your house keys, do you?

Of course not. Who's proposing anything like that? But here's what it does mean. If I go to a doctor's office and show them my driver's license, they can establish an account for me there. They will associate my confidential medical records with that account. Later, I can access those records by presenting them my driver's license. The benefit is that I don't have to carry around *different* ID's for everything I do -- my driver's license authenticates me to everyone who stores information about me.

That is what OpenID can provide. And it's just as secure as any web authentication system out there (the security depends on the security of your "home" website, but if you are using it for sensitive things, you'll choose a home site whose security you trust).