Scoble posted what’s maybe his best post since I started reading his blog.
He starts off by linking to a Mashable review of Zooomr vs Flickr to tell a story about Zooomr, a photo sharing site from Kristopher Tate and Thomas Hawk (that’s really just the two of them), competing with the likes of Yahoo (Flickr) and Fox (MySpace).
I can’t tell the story better than Scoble, but I’d like to point out to a couple of things that resounded in my head. Now Zooomr experienced 2 weeks downtime. Needless to say, that’s a MAJOR problem if you host a photo sharing site.
To use Robert’s words:
After all, any other Web 2.0 business that had been down for two weeks would just have been written off. One reason we still care is because Zooomr did pretty well over their two-weeks of hell (they were down for two weeks) by staying visible thanks to live video streaming on UStream.tv.
So, what happened? They basically kept on the conversation. Even in their worst possible scenario, they were transparent and open to discussion. Strangely, people cared.
Why? Because they were part of a compelling story. They weren’t actually experiencing a site downtime. Not at all. By simply being explained what was happening, people became part of the story. They became brave guys helping a 19-years-old kid keeping up his unlikely company against hordes of Goliaths. That’s a can’t miss story if simply you are part of it. I can see Yahoo employees cheering for Kris to succeed. Brilliant.
For the record, now the site is up again (on Zoho servers) and I’d like to know what happened to their registered users count. I’m much more likely to join Zooomr now than I was before the downtime. Of course, having the site up is not the point anymore. Not now that users benefit became heroism.
