Zooomr, a photosharing website a la Flickr went down for scheduled maintenance yesterday and was scheduled to launch its 2.0 version today at 5 PM EDT. Zooomr implemented a nifty countdown feature that showed how many hours, minutes, and seconds were left until launch. I was intrigued because almost nothing (especially in web development) goes off as planned. Having a timer takes guts - or perhaps youthful exuberance. After all, Kris Tate, the founder, is all of 17 years old.

Sure enough, the clock just hit zero and started ascending, mockingly counting each second by which the deadline was overrun. Now the site, which is stuck on 11:09 has the following message:

Worldwide release of the all new Zooomr

Officially launching ASAP!

Just to be clear, I am not making fun of Kris and the Zooomr team - just commenting on the nature of deadlines. The Zooomr team has done amazing work, and deserve no criticism even if they take another full day to get the site up and running.

I just hope for their sake that they can get it done by 8:00 o’clock so they can make the free beer

Update: Apparently Zooomr has been under an denial of service attack all day. Thomas Hawk says they should be up and running by 7pm.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Admin, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.