“You’re violating that rule, and the sad thing is you don’t even think it’s a big deal.” — Zoli

It sounds to me like they think it’s a big deal.

They had problems when they were releasing the 2nd version of zooomr, with similar symptoms. The photos in all blogs were out and etc.

They blame the problem on RAID failure again. What seems a strange coincidence is that they always have Hardware failures! (and now luck of communication blamed on the blog!)

In Zooomr 2, some of the photos were corrupted and they “compensate” the users with PRO4Life accounts. I do not care to save a few $$$ and end up with corrupted data!

My point is that they did not gained any experience from the previous failed launch attempts. Back in October they had a delayed launch attempt again and on March the launch failed completely. Now the launch is delayed 13 days, and we do not yet know if the photos in their database are corrupted. Do you trust this company with your photos? Personally I don’t!

If Kris and Thomas wants people to take them seriously they should invest on reliability and hire a few developers. They are always hiding behind the excuse “We are only 2 people, 1 developer”. Zooomr hire some stuff! unless you believe that nobody else is good as Kris! I would rather pay and use a reliable and stable service rather than a free unreliable and unstable.

Just ask yourself this: What do you want all these features if the site is unavailable? Your blogged photos are offline? and How do you trust a company with so many RAID failure?

Thanks for commenting in detail. 

Re.  communication: any stranger can still post comments to your last blog entry, so at a minimum you should still be able to do it.  Is it better than Ustream.tv?   C’mon, even active chat participants ask for an update when they log in to ustream – otherwise how would they know?  And that’s only 150 of your 50k users.  The rest are the more passive users, who don’t follow the drama step by step. They just notice the service is down, come to the homepage and don’t find updates there.  Do you think they will take the time to watch a streaming video for hours trying to decipher what’s going on?

“But we do think it will be better for Zooomr longer term to have the Sun box” .  You may very well be right (even though it’s just a loaner, and you know the only way you can keep it is to get quickly funded). The issue is prioritization.  Again, 50k users are locked out of their data – yes, even pictures are data that some might want to access.  Reliabilty is #1 for any SaaS provider – and yes, that’s what you are.  Your getting feedback from the 150 strong minority, your absolute fans, but are making decisions for the other 50K.  How do you know how many of them you’ll lose after this?   There’s a credibility issue on two fronts: first, the ability to restore service in a timely manner, but more importantly, second, your own thinking, priorities, which clearly shows you’d rather do all the nice-to-have’s, long term stuff ..etc than restoring access quickly.        

To put it bluntly: an unwritten rule of SaaS is to restore access ASAP. Improvements come after that. You’re violating that rule, and the sad thing is you don’t even think it’s a big deal.

“We are a two man team trying to pull off a dream. . We are doing the best that we can and I think that people understand that.” That I absolutely agree with, I hope it was clear in my post.

“you can’t understand because what they know that you may not is that we are doing this for them.”   Oh, man, if  only you knew …

From what I have seen and heard, the Zooomr feature-set introduced in Mark III have improved considerably and are more to my liking compared to what I have found on Flickr. And the community feel is much, much stronger with Zooomr.

Not to mention the stock photography features coming in the near future.

In terms of Kristopher’s efforts. Obviously getting the Sun machine up, configured and running, was not as easy as we’d hoped. The reason why a Sun rep was in there with Kristopher all morning was to hopefully get this resolved. We certainly weren’t familiar with the hardware configuration to begin with to anticipate the power problem.

But we do think it will be better for Zooomr longer term to have the Sun box as a resource and want to get that online before just turning it back on. Especially in light of the large potential number of photos that could be transferred over to Zooomr when we release our Flickr to Zooomr importer, having an adequate storage solution will be important.

With the recovery of the Dell system this allowed us to do something important which was to get our static photos back up online (i.e. your blogged photos on Zooomr work now).

We are very close to getting the Sun machine in line with the system, but after spending all afternoon and all night and most of this morning down at the data center he physically just crashed. He took a Cal Train back up to the City and will get some sleep and turn around and head right back down there. We hope to have the service back up this weekend some time.

I’ve been around chatting with folks online as I can. Earlier today. Late last night. I was down at the data center with Kristopher yesterday afternoon. I had to take off to go to my son’s baseball awards dinner. He’s six and got his first trophy ever and well some things like that are just too important to miss.

Although I lack the technical expertise to help Kristopher I have been communicating regularly with our community, most of which are very supportive as you note.

We are a two man team trying to pull off a dream. We want to build the first truly global photo sharing site and for the first time open up the $2.5 billion stock photography market to the entire world. These are big goals and ambitions. But we are just two guys. We are doing the best that we can and I think that people understand that.

It’s easy for people to take potshots at Zooomr when we are down. But we will be back up. We will get back online. And these growing pains will be a part of our history. But we will always remember the people who stood by us in our troubles and I think the support that they are giving us is something that you can’t understand because what they know that you may not is that we are doing this for them.

We are personally sacrificing much to make a better global photosharing site and to make it possible for everyone — even kids in India and China — to be able to sell photos to the rest of the world.

I think that most of our users understand how and why we are having problems. We’ve been nothing but transparent about that. You might think the blog is a better vehicle to communicate with than Ustream and chat and we will post there again as soon as Kristopher gets our posting stuff back up there too, but we are most certainly communicating.

If we weren’t I wouldn’t be commenting on your blog right now.

Enjoy your sleep this weekend, we’ll be working.

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Cheers,