By Jennifer Wang
Angelo Sotira fidgets like a kid caught without his PSP2. Skinny, fashionably unshaven and looking even younger than 30 in ripped jeans and a True Religion thermal, he scoots back and forth on the couch in his office, bounces his knees and leans over the coffee table as he talks about launching the biggest, longest-running social network you've probably never heard of....
"When we started this," he says, fingers tapping against his leg, "we wanted to build the deepest, most vertically integrated network that ever existed."
By all accounts, Sotira has succeeded. He is co-founder and CEO of deviantART, an online artists' community that started in 2000 and now has a staggering membership of more than 14 million....
If it sounds like what other social networks have been doing for years, well, that's because they have been doing it for years. But, in fact, deviantART was doing most of it first. It is one of the world's first comprehensive online communities formed around user-generated content, and it was up and running three years before Myspace, four years before Flickr and Facebook — and a whole decade before Aaron Sorkin and Hollywood decreed it the age of The Social Network....
Certainly, 10 years is a long time on the web, especially under the same management, says Dan Perkel (perkelate), a doctoral candidate at University of California Berkeley's School of Information who's been studying deviantART since 2007. Perkel says deviantART thrives because it pays more than lip service to the notion of community building and functions more like the real world than a networking tool, even down to its coolness toward outsiders.
"It will be interesting to see how the community reacts to more mainstream exposure, but the site's reputation isn't under question," he says. "While some artists have left for Flickr, and people can make incredible communities on LiveJournal, deviantART has attained a level of currency in the art world as having the most comprehensive, best display of visual media."...