Owner ipernity Commercial yes | Created by Christophe Ruelle | |
Type of site Sharing, Social networking Available in Catalan, Czech, Chinese, Dutch, English, Esperanto, French, Galician, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish Website | ||
ipernity is a website offering free and paid multimedia sharing and social networking services. The site is designed for authors, artists and casual users, and allows publishing and sharing of photos, blog entries, videos and audio files.
Contents
ipernity is often compared to Flickr, another photo sharing website. It won the second Open Web Awards in the Photo Sharing category in December 2008.
History
ipernity is a project established in 2005 by French programmers Christophe Ruelle, co-founder of Voila (a search engine bought by France Telecom in 1998) and eStat (a site-centric traffic measurement system), and Christian Conti, co-founder of Respublica (a French-speaking online community, bought by Libertysurf/Tiscali in 2000). The project was created to allow anyone to maintain their digital life permanently in one place. ipernity was developed in Sophia Antipolis and required two years of programming and testing, and was built chiefly with free and open source software technology. On May 2006, an alpha version of the site went online. ipernity was updated to a beta release in April 2007.
In 2013, many Flickr users unhappy with the site's redesign switched to ipernity. ipernity developed a script to import photos from Flickr.
On 1 December 2016, ipernity announced via a blog post that the site would likely be shutting down by January 2017.
Features
ipernity was designed for authors and artists who wanted to promote their digital work on the internet, and for people who wanted to share photos privately with family and friends. The ipernity blog is widely used by the Esperanto-speaking community. ipernity receives an average of 95,000 visitors per day. Ipernity uses Creative Commons licenses.
ipernity allows the publishing and sharing of blog entries, photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital content, which can be organized in multimedia albums. Several upload methods are available. Authors and visitors may tag every content with keywords, tags, and geotags. These metadata make searching easy and allow new functions such as geographical searches for photos and videos (a mashup of Google Maps).
ipernity allows interactivity between content, authors and visitors, in the form of feedback and comments systems, contacts networks, instant messaging and emails.
All contents published on ipernity may be pushed to feed third-party services such as RSS/Atom readers, personalized start pages (Netvibes, iGoogle), and social-bookmarking services like del.icio.us. ipernity includes an API allowing third parties to develop mashups, software and services interacting with its platform. In October 2008 the API was released to the public.