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Focussion, one year on

Screen shot 2011-06-20 at 17.03.30

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? Well, I’ve certainly been having fun and I can’t quite believe that it has been very nearly a year since we took a peek at the community over at Focussion. It’s a photo-sharing site that actively encourages giving feedback to other members: you’re given an initial stash of tokens and every image that you upload costs you tokens. You can only replenish your token supply by dishing out feedback.

A year on, I was wondering how things were going for them, so I caught up with Aljan, one of the co-founders.

‘We’ve grown a whole heap in our first year,’ says Aljan ‘and we’ve added several new features to Focussion, too.’

A key feature that they’ve implemented is giving extra tokens to a member when her or his feedback is marked as helpful. Obviously that goes some way to ensuring that feedback is more than just ‘Great shot!’ (And I’ll admit that I’m rather pleased about this because it was something that I recommended when I jumped in last year.)

In a bit of a FaceBook-esque move, you no longer rate photos, but ‘like’ them instead.

The front page still shows the most recently uploaded images, but over on the sidebar you now get to see most liked images and most helpful members in addition to most recently commented-on images.

Realising that their members wanted to talk to eachother outside of photo critique, the team created some forums, too. So now there’s chatter about gear, techniques, and what’s happening on the site.

As for what’s happening on site, they’ve a few plans up their sleeves: ‘We’re going to launch a photo contest soon, as well as enable members of uplaod sets or series of images. And we’re working on allowing photos to be displayed across the width of the page, too.’

It’s great to see that people have embraced Focussion and it isn’t just another photo-sharing site that’s slipped by the wayside. If you’ve not checked it out yet, and you’re looking for some feedback on your work, wander over and have a look.