WARNING: CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE, OPINIONS AND IS (possibly) DEMEANING OF YOUR CHARACTER

I’ve been wondering for a long time if I should write this. I have a (bad) habit of shooting my mouth off in public, which hasn’t actually caused me any problems, but I’m sure one day it will. It doesn’t matter who it is, where it is, what the audience is, I like to try and speak my mind. Unfortunately sometimes my mind is ruthless in the pursuit of being deliberately rude to people it has decided it doesn’t like.

Anyways here goes.

Background
All of this stems from several recent complaints about Zooomr’s current lack of feature adding and bug fixing including blog posts from my friend and yours Raul Pop, among others.

To get a general idea of the sort of bleating I’m talking about you can read [this two page zipline thread]. If you don’t want to read it (or just can’t read) then I’ll bullet point out the jist.

• Zooomr hasn’t gotten any new features recently
• Not enough bugs have been fixed fast enough — AKA I’m going home (flickr) and taking my ball (photos) with me!
• Kris we haven’t heard anything from you, have you died?
• Kris you’re in Japan doing stuff on Zooomr mobile do you not love us any more? :(

Kris wrote his own reply to this on the [Zooomr Blog], but I felt a need to reinforce it a bit.

You might want to close yours eyes for this, it’s going to sting.
OK so straight up ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE. Well maybe not the bugs one, it’s hard to measure that, and it’s open to opinions.

The problem I have is people moaning about these things, anyone who’s spent a decent amount of time following/using/loving Zooomr should have followed the same story that I have followed, it goes a bit like this:

• Zooomr starts up, has investers, has cash, has server, has MKII (mark two)
• Kris creates MKIII (mark three), server bites the dust, investors see that Zooomr is cash positive (mostly due to Kris eating only pot noodles) and pull out
• Zooomr is totally fucked. Kris hasn’t slept in a week, the server is in pieces, people are donating via paypal but it’s only really enough for a macbook pro with 3 year apple care
• Sun and Zoho step in to rescue Zooomr! – YAY
• MKIII gets up and running, lots of bugs to begin with (most of which are ironed out by now) but we love it anyway
• Kris goes to Japan and gets involved with some dudes there, creates Zooomr mobile – which looks awesome but only works with decent 3G phones (i.e. stuff not available in the US)
• Kris gets some of his new mates working on Zooomr

That’s pretty much the emotional and financial roller-coaster that is Zooomr’s history. It’s nice to see something that doesn’t die even if people take away pretty much everything it needs to survive – perhaps it’s viral….

OK so lets go through the moans:

Zooomr hasn’t gotten any new features recently

No it hasn’t. Why do you think that is? Perhaps you could use your brain for a second and realise that KT is only one man. He can realistically only develop one thing at a time. He needs to develop things that will make Zooomr some cash, Sun and Zoho have rescued us for now but we can’t rely on them! So Zooomr mobile is born! It’s only for Japan but that’s OK and it makes investers look at Zooomr and say “That’s really neat – here’s a lorry load of cash”.

Why some of you fuckers can’t see this amazes me, it truly does! I bet none of you NONE OF YOU could write anything that was like Zooomr and what have you given back? $24?, “your time”? what a crock of shit, you should be ashamed of your worthless hide. Servers cost money, storage costs money, data transfer costs money. Kris doesn’t have a job like you, this is all he has! Virtually nothing survives what Zooomr has already been through and subsequently walked off! Be thankful for what you got!

Not enough bugs have been fixed fast enough AKA I’m going home (flickr) and taking my ball (photos) with me!
Good. Go home and think about what you’ve done. You didn’t write Zooomr, you almost certainly couldn’t write it, stop making demands. EXIF data isn’t a “stop ship” problem GET OVER IT! See point 1.

Kris we haven’t heard anything from you, have you died?
I think the problem here is something that has happened before. From time to time the community (on Zooomr) completely distract KT from doing any “real work” – which is probably great for his sanity. What this means is we see lots of him on ZooomrTV, lots of blog posts lots of zipline posts. There are other times too, when Kris is actually doing stuff which means he’s quiet.

What people don’t like is this noisy to quiet transition, they start bleating like a flock of lambs once the Shepard has gone home. It’s fucking pathetic “Oh Kris you’re ignoring all the U.S. people”, “You’re not engaging with the community any more”, “You’re not telling us what’s going on!”. Are you people like this with everything? Do you want him to do stuff or tell you about the stuff he’s going to do? Yet more shame cast on your already filthy shame-ridden soul. Shall I write a dancing KT flash game that keeps you entertained while the man himself gets on with the job? I fucking would if it could shut your sprek holes!

Kris you’re in Japan doing stuff on mobile do you not love us any more? :(
At this point I nearly exploded. I’ve shown you the history above. Most chimps could probably work this out. How can you live your lives with such impatience?!

Building things in software is very different from building things in real life. In real life if one man built half a house and then another dude turns up, the second half of the house would be built twice as fast as the first half. In software the second half of the house would probably take longer – why? – because were not building a fucking house dumbass! we’re creating the future! It’s like building something where you make it up as you go along! THERE ARE NO BLUEPRINTS! All you know is what you want it to do, not how it’s going to look.

Everyone seems to have missed the most important point: more people developing Zooomr! MORE PEOPLE!! MORE!!! And that means that while KT is working on (for instance) Zooomr on your iPod, then one of his co-developers (lets call him dave) can be working on getting EXIF data sorted out for your camera phone while yet another dude (lets call her davina) is keeping you all entertained on Zooomr TV.

So what should you do now? Be thankful for what you have; because it could have all been so much different. Be patient, getting all up in KT’s face about it isn’t going to make it go faster. Be constructive, Zooomr is partly community funded in a not too dissimilar way to Linux. And like Linux things take time, but they get done and they normally turn out better for it.

You can open your eyes again now
Right OK rant over. I hope I’ve managed to make it clear as to why I felt inclined to write this shouty angry un-constructive post and I hope by the same measure that I’ve made you feel ashamed of yourself if you have been guilty of anything mentioned here, because I truly believe you should be. Now it’s time to learn from it.