sleeping on the job
by dawn ~ July 24, 2007
I was proselytizing zooomr during the early parts of the summer. I wrote about the amazing actions of some companies to assist the zooomr team in overcoming their upgrade emergencies. And I cheered them on when people were tearing them down. I was a zooomr evangelist - and excited about it.
But I’m not anymore. In fact, I’m feeling a bit shamefaced in urging you to go check it out. Remember when I quoted Thomas Hawk? He said,
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.
And I agreed with him. And they are back online. But the growing pains are still going on, nearly two months after they began.
Services are still not restored. The only way to see who has commented on my photos or favorited them is to actually go into EACH photo SEPARATELY and look.
The IPTC information is still not coming in totally. Sure, tags are coming in. But the titles, descriptions, and copyrights of my work are not being attached in zooomr. In fact, I have to set these with each upload that I do for each photo that I upload.
Not only that, but when I do create a description, it is not holding the HTML that I put in it.
These are all things that work pre-MarkIII.
Sets and Favorites JUST started working this week. And even then, they aren’t great. I don’t know who favorites my work without looking at each photo. The sets are limited in how you can create them.
The site REALLY needs good usability testing. The usability sucks. Really. I’m not just saying this. Others have said the same to me (and it probably doesn’t hurt that we’re all trained in usability, either).
They took commenting off of the zooomr blog because they wanted people to use the groups more. However, it’s hard to see groups in action. I see every single group in zooomr, whether I’m subscribed to it or not. I have to weed through to find my few groups. And I’ve never once had Thomas or Kristopher reply to me in either a group, the Zipline, or email. I don’t even know if they read what I have to say. Probably not.
To say I’m disappointed is an understatement.
I think, at this point, it has turned into a “hey, look at me” venture for Thomas and Kristopher and not a “lets create a wonderful online experience for our users.”
I don’t care that you’re at party schmoozing with other geeks. I don’t care that you’re attending a blog camp that has nothing to do with zooomr. What I do care about is that the site you set up functions and functions well.
I’ve been patient. Now I’m just annoyed.