Scoble and Butterfield views about Zooomr

Robert Scoble is good friends with Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate, so he's been close to the action as Zooomr has launched their Mark III version  over the past few weeks.

To say it went badly is an understatement - the website was down for close to two weeks.  Robert's recent post is a considered summary of what happens now.

• Zooomr is the underdog (basically just a single developer), but it has put together some good features
• These good features may pull in more users - it's currently getting good reviews from bloggers
• The infrastructure they have now cant cope
• The community has rallied round to give them some breathing space (Zoho has put them up in its datacenter, Sun has loaned them a hefty server)
• It's time to end the experiment - by the time the loaner Sun system goes back (56 days), Robert thinks they should make sure they have VC funding in place, and turn this into a real business

For another good take on Zooomr, see this forum post by Stewart Butterfield (one of Flickr's founders), which appears in along thread which offers proof that Zooomr includes copied source code from flickr.  Stewart states:

• I'd be astonished if Zooomr (without a radical change) is even around in two years.
• I've never had a moment of doubt in thinking that Zooomr poses zero competitive threat to Flickr.