What is Ipernity?
A (photo)sharing community?
An artists’ showroom?
A social networking service?
A cloud storage?
A daily pastime for people not having a real life?

No idea?
Don’t guess, let’s do some research. We all are scientists, aren’t we? ;-)

Looking at the Ipernity front page we can find three answers (given by Christohe Ruelle):
Cloud storage
Sharing emotions
Virtual diary

No, we are not finished. We are scientists, we do our own research. By clicking on some random pictures displayed on the front page we soon will recognize a pattern:
There is a picture published, followed by a long tail of comments and commented comments and replies to comments and…..……..
It’s a conversation. A virtual remote conversation.

So we can take down: Ipernity is mostly about talking to others. It’s all about communication. By the way, what is photography but communication? Photography delivers information, photography expresses sentiments, photography evokes emotions…..
Yes, photography is communication, too, and that is the main purpose of “photo sharing” sites: Communication. So was at Panoramio, so is at Flickr and all other photo sites. Even photo selling sites give their users a chance to rate and comment other users’ pictures.
Maybe photographers are particularly keen on seeing the world with different lenses eyes and to discuss those different points of view.

In Ipernity you can add friends, get notified when your buddies publish new content or others comment on your content or reply to your annotations, you can like content, you have an internal messaging system, you can participate in groups….
Spot a pattern?
It’s like facebook. Ok, like a platinum facebook with no ads and no spying. But it’s all about staying in touch with others.
And again, reality caught up with my article… Today I heard on the radio facebook is testing a new feature called “explore feed” – that reminds me of something ;-)

And now back to our initial question: What is Ipernity and where should it go to?
Ipernity is not an artists’ site. There are enthusiastic amateurs communicating by and about (admittedly sometimes brilliant) pictures (and sometimes articles as well ;-))
But what does that mean for the future direction of Ipernity?
The key aspect of Ipernity is not photography, even if it looks like that. It is caressing social contacts.
And that means focusing on photography only will not cover the whole range of Ipernity and it’s users. So when promoting Ipernity the main focus should be the social side of it. In a press release (to come soon) the community should be emphasised, not the pictures! Ipernity is much more then only photographs and that should be communicated clearly. We did not take all that troubles only for pictures but for a grown community.

And that must be the direction to develop Ipernity to: A community, not only a showroom. That’s the real story behind it!
In my point of view there is a non-negligible danger of damaging Ipernity if IMA concentrates to much only on displaying photos. Right: There is no desktop-PC optimized photo site in the market. But maybe there is no market for such a site. We did (and still can) see photo sites vanish or change into something else. What Ipernity faces at the moment is sort of cutting costs and concentrating on the core business, which is said to be photographs. I utterly agree with cutting costs and removing space and money wasting dead accounts, no question. But what if the core business wasn’t photos at all? Think about it…….


As a shot excursus at the end, why did other photographers take over their web site? Take a look at blipfoto, another user run photo community.
In this article www.blipfoto.com/entry/2368458176572951297 some long-time “blippers” explain, why they do publish at blipfoto.
And again: See the pattern? It’s not about being an exceptional photographer. It’s about having a journal of your life, it’s about virtual friendship emerging to real life friendship. They even recommend, not to see it as a photographic contest…….


Addition october 29th:
To avoid any possible misunterstandings - I am not talking about changing Ipernity into something different. But I strongly ask to be aware of Ipernity's brand essence - and that is not photoaphy, even it looks like that.
Imagine: Some day future browsers will no longer suport the current code of the site. So it has to be changed. If we all agree that Ipernity is about showing pictures a slim and simple Joomla gallery will do. But that would be the death of the site!
IMA asked for userspictures to promote Ipernty in social media. So Ipernity will be introduced as a gallery platform. But who might be interested in yet another photo site?
Probably noone.
As I said in the discussion beneath the IMA news flash: I do not need social media, I've got Ipernity.

So get clear about Ipernity's core!