Bloody Microsoft Word! I had actually written this whole post out in Word. And then Word crashed. For no reason. I didn’t even get a chance to take a screenshot of the page so that I wouldn’t have lost everything. Oh well. I shall start from scratch.

Last week I was quite keen to see the new version of Zooomr, the photo sharing site. It was down for a few days as they were deploying the new version. Turned out the new version wasn’t quite ready and they ended up rolling back to the existing version. I commented that it looked a bit “busy” (design-wise) and lo and behold (I’m pretty sure that’s how you’re supposed to spell that expression) Kristopher Tate, the founder of Zooomr, within about an hour, responded to my comments. I am guessing he found it from Technorati (where my site is included automatically thanks to Blogger – not that Blogger is the only blog service (hosted or otherwise) that allows this). There’s something neat about writing about someone’s product and then having that person respond to you. It’s cool.

Anyway, more than a week later and still Zooomr Mark III (I’ll just click Save now as I have written a bit) isn’t up. But, it’s good that it’s not up because I think everyone would like a site that works. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing new features and not being able to use them. Mark II, apart from its ugliness, is pretty cool. I like the way it does geotagging, particularly as it uses Google Maps. It’s also cool to be able to get a page of photos taken in the vicinity of another photo. You can see the photo in context.

Zooomr, like many sites out there, uses the Google Maps API. Zooomr Mark III in fact promises an API (perhaps there’s one out there for Mark II already, but I’m not sure). Flickr‘s got one, as does Facebook. Amazon‘s had one for a long time. It’s amazing what applications people can come up with by using public APIs of other services.

In response to my “busy” criticism, Kristopher pointed me to this screenshot of a page in the new Zooomr. It’s much more to my liking.

I have to congratulate Kristopher on having his finger on the pulse of what his users (and non-users, as I was at the time of the post) think of his service. It’s good to see the personal touch. In fact, I wouldn’t have written more on Zooomr if it weren’t for his comment. It’s not just good marketing – it shows he believes in what Zooomr offers and wants to share that with others. As we say in France (sometimes – although apparently it’s a bit dated) – “supercool”. Seriously. They say that.