Photo forums

Photo forums are like communities. People within communities interact with one another, and share similar interests.

It’s been stated before, that “United we stand, divided we fall”, yet, it doesn’t seem to occur to folks starting new forums and groups, that fragmentation isn’t exactly a good thing. Sure, choice is great, but when there’s a ballpark five different sites to choose from, when you want to flog off 20 rolls of expired film, it just gets a little harder.

Cherry picking is never convenient for the users

In Malaysia, for “trading” as an example, we have:

• PhotoMalaysia, probably one of the oldest photo forums, for the country
• MIR’s Photography in Malaysia, direct trading forum, the Free Trade Zone
• Lensa Malaysia, started after Jeff Ooi decided PhotoMalaysia wasn’t credible
• New kid on the block (?), PhotoKaki.com (though by their post numbers, they’ve been around for a while)

So, thats a lot of photo sites, with a lot of fragmentation. Look at Flickr as another example, we’ve got several Malaysian groups: Malaysia Images (193 members), Malaysia Boleh (340 members), Malaysia (204 members). There’s also a group for Malaysians Abroad, but let’s discount that for the moment.

All this boils down to the users. If we wanted to build a strong community, we require one good site for all to go to. Each individual site offers their own strengths, and if they harnessed it together, we could be a very large and productive photographic community.

Besides, I still don’t see innovation like RSS feeds like they do at the MySQL Forums…