something I said

Zoto is a photo-hosting service that performs to a higher standard than more widely known services like Flickr and Picasa. It provides unlimited space, a very useful uploading tool (better than Picasa), has a clean, elegant interface and is very cheap at $19.95 a year (cheaper than Flickr, Picasa, or Smugmug).

I signed up way back when it was a free service, and stayed when they started asking for money. In sharp contrast to Flickr, Zoto were responsive to users, treating them as adults and providing individual support again and again. A better service than most for less money than others, Zoto was underpriced and undervalued. Not just in monetary terms. Zoto was also undervalued through the lack of recognition from the wider photo-sharing community. For whatever reason, Zoto remained near-unknown in the Anglophone internet (while apparently being extraordinarily popular in China). This great little service remained an open secret.

But somewhere along the way something went wrong. Several times. Some key people left. Zoto was a small outfit with five staff who were clearly passionate and extraordinarily smart about their project. It looks like at least one of those bright sparks left during a big push to roll out a thoroughly rewritten version. The launch date was delayed at least once. (Was it an extra six months before version 3 was released?) But then there were further delays. Previously existing features disappeared. Promised features were suspended. The new version didn’t work so well in non-compliant browsers like Microsoft’s IE. It also took a long time to load on older machines. None of which mattered to the visionary crew.

At some point it seemed that the CEO was anxiously trying to sell the business, but not finding a buyer. An air of desperation started to show up in the responses to users. Some ugly scenes played out online. The quality of service declined, as though they were not able to keep operating at the former level.

More promised features were postponed - indefinitely. By the end of January 2008 it seemed as though the company consisted of two people, neither of whom were responding to queries at the support forum. Users were having trouble with basic functions. One user couldn’t log in, another user got an error every time she tried to upload images. Basic stuff that deserves immediate attention.

February and March rolled past. No word from Zoto. Then I found that the CEO had been busy with other projects, and was developing those even as Zoto foundered. So when he popped up on his own blog, in late March, to say that Zoto code was being set out on a BSD open source license at Google Code, and started getting a bit of press (1, 2, 3) about it, I wrote to ask whether he’d be responding to Zoto users soon. I also posted a long comment on the other blogs with the intent of provoking a reponse by bringing it to wider public attention. (I am also doing that here, with the distinction that it’s my own blog, and not subject to someone else’s editorial control.) So far, no reply to those either, but I anticipate that something will kick off, maybe later rather than sooner.

I am hoping that this is rock bottom for Zoto, for the decline in support, that things will get better, and sooner rather than later. But I’m not holding my breath. Nothing has reversed the trend over the past year. It looks like it’s been a brave fight, but I am beginning to see Zoto as a victim of its own ambition, taking on too much too quickly, failing to find the support it needed, and unable to stem the collapse that set in when it couldn’t sustain that level of ambition. While the service still exists, and I have no trouble logging in or uploading, Zoto’s failure to fix other people’s problems is clear notice that things are falling apart.