Drunken CEO crank that hates Flickr steals from it
NICK DOUGLAS — Not exactly, but we thought we'd borrow the headline style of Thomas Hawk, photographer, often-outraged blogger, and CEO of photo sharing service Zooomr. One of Hawk's recent headlines is "Flickr = Censorship," reacting to actions by Zooomr's direct competitor Flickr. Even though there are scads of other photo sharing sites like SmugMug and Photobucket, Zooomr is always compared to Flickr because, well, they look just the same, especially in Zooomr's new version. In fact, some Flickr users think they caught Zooomr copying Flickr's source code into Zooomr.
The drama culminates in this Flickr forum, where Hawk jumps in to defend Zooomr's one other employee, coder Kris Tate. But he does a pretty bad job of it, admitting, "I'm not a coder and quite frankly couldn't tell you computer code from newspaper type...I also don't really understand coding ethics and all that either."
Hawk then returns to invite all the angry Flickr users to Zooomr ("But even I'm growing tired of the negativity. Come play on Zooomr") in what has to be the world's most poorly thought-out marketing ploy.
Why is the CEO doing this poorly? Blame the drink. Hawk admits in one message, "I've had a couple of bottles of wine at this point."
