Pixel Peers?

What does it have that Photo.net doesn't have?

I paid like $25 for annual membership here. Is pixelpeers worth 4 times as much? I get unlimited storage here and on the imagepro site with that. If you do a Google on my name, the top 5 hits are photo.net links.

When I do a Google search for a photography question, almost always the answer comes from this site. Never heard of pixelpeers before.

I hadn't either, which is why I asked. I had the same questions as you!

I just took a quick peek at the site. I'll be blunt with my initial impressions...

They launched prematurely. There's very little activity anywhere. It looks like a beta site.

They're promising social networking, SEO help, discussion forums, etc. Frankly, I wouldn't be an early subscriber to a site that promised so much but launched with so little activity. You'd think a site that promises social networking with peers, SEO, forums, etc., would be run by an individual or group of business partners with an already-established social network large enough to launch with the appearance of plenty of activity. Even if it's obviously seeding by business partners, family and friends, at least it would help give a better impression. Right now I can practically hear an echo on the site.

Also, it's not clear what they're offering that's better than many other well established sites.

I wish them luck, but they have a ways to go to improve upon long established sites like photo.net, Flickr, dpreview and many others.

it's not clear what they're offering that's better than many other well established sites.

Just look at Google+, they are hardly under capitalized, and yet their growth is still slow enough now that its success is unpredictable.

But then I would never have predicted Facebook would trounce MySpace the way that it has. I never thought that people would actually post real names, phone numbers, kids photos, and addresses on a public website either(completely unpredictable for me).

The difference is that the purpose of Google+ was very clear from the beginning - an alternative to Facebook, well timed to take advantage of the loss of confidence Facebook suffered last year due to privacy concerns. And the purpose of Myspace and Facebook was already very clear.

To me, it's not entirely clear what Pixel Peers intends to do better, or at least differently, than other well established photography websites. If their goal was to provide a more transparent interface with Facebook and Google+, it's not immediately clear to me. I'm only average in web savvy so if it's not clear to me, it's probably unclear to many others as well.

As for SEO, it's really tough to beat established sites like photo.net. That's one of the least recognized and most under-appreciated benefits to photo.net membership. Photo.net has offered unusually high Google prominence for the past few years, compared with most comparable photography websites. Yet it often appears that only SEO spammers realize this, which makes us a popular target for spammers. I see only a relatively small handful of members using photo.net effectively as part of an overall strategy for name recognition. (I do see a lot of hamfisted attempts to use photo.net for self-promotion, which really isn't necessary - photo.net has already done most of the heavy lifting, which is one reason why we don't use signature lines.)

BTW, just to document the points I made above, regarding photo.net's Google prominence, I've attached a screencap of a Google search I just did for Pixel Peers.
'nuff said?*

*Okay, maybe not quite 'nuff. I repeated the same search with two different proxies (UK and Germany) and via Startpage, in an effort to minimize the filter bubble effect as a factor. In every case photo.net was the first site to show a hit *other* than Pixel Peers' own site. However, Google appears to have been tweaked during the past few months to give higher priority to the most recent mentions of a search term. Since this thread has been fairly active for the past 24 hours, that might give higher priority than some other sites that have mentioned the same thing, such as CNET.

I'd love to have a look, but no FREE trial? I can see a "need" to keep it a bit selective, but to me not offering a way to try it for free is not a very smart move. And for all I see: self-regulation/moderation like done here seems to work just fine as well. So, what would make me pay?
The discount on Adorama is nice - if you're in the US. For Europeans and Asians, it's not very tempting. A directory of available jobs for sure is a very good idea - but it needs to show samples and share some success-stories. As it is, it's a lot of promise, but nothing solid. Again, why would I pay up any dollar/euro/yen? I simply can't see how they want to break in, with immediately putting up a vast barrier. Not a smart tactic, to me.

And with forums being empty, it's hard to tell what audience it will attract. I like the p.net forum for a reason, and dislike the dpreview.com forum for roughly the same reasons. I'd hate to be a paid member of a forum that excels in flamewars, my-brand-versus-your-brand arguments and my-film-outresolves-your-sensor endless battles. It's an unknown quantity.

Would Facebook have been succesful versus MySpace if it costed a dime to join? I don't belief so...

It's obviously impossible to predict which is likely to be more successful in the long term, but I did find it interesting to compare pixelpeers.com to 72dpi.com (another new photographically oriented web site).

Although clearly marked as still being in beta testing, 72dpi.com has some nice looking pictures (with what appear to be genuine comments). It is primarily a photo-sharing site, with less emphasis on socializing or commercialization/SEO, but at least it looks like a site that could well interest a fair number of photographers. At the same time, it does seem to have something of the same barrier: there are already a lot of sites that already do the same sort of thing pretty well (e.g., Flickr, 500px.com, etc.)

I am one of the head admins for the website of Pixel Peers. What makes this site different from photo.net and every other website designed for photographers?
We are a true social network, period.
The first thing people need to stop doing is associating the word free by meaning a good thing. It seems many people on the internet are completely clueless when using a free website. When you aren't paying for a product the easiest explanation is because you are the product being sold.
Right now in Canada and the USA they are in the process of trying to pass legislation that if successful will stop online advertising companies from virtually stealing your private information only to re-sell it.
The one thing we wanted with Pixel Peers was a true social network that wouldn't be filled with ads or people being solicited. A place where photographers can network more than any other website and simply just enjoy what they do.
Sorry but the system we have in place for allowing photographers to 'friend" each others as peers is seriously better than most of the sites we've seen online. The reason being is that the entire website design was done to be some what familiar to photographers based on another well known social network that we really can't name.
The bigger question I ask people, is your online privacy worth 8 dollars a month? We aren't a corporate company. We were simply a website created by a small group of photographers. Something just for photographers.
While we do admit there are a lot of free sites out there that offer some level of social networking there aren't many that offer a full social network feel.
Pixel peers offers you the ability to network and permanently make connections with other photographers. Similar to becoming a friend they become one of your "Peers". You have the ability to make your own Pixel Peers business page which allows you to upload photos and blog. It's somewhat similar to the "page" feature on Facebook.
We offer you the ability to create a unique listing in our photographer's directory. We wanted to go one step further with this. You are able to get reviews posted on your listing from other professionals and your paying clients. This way future clients can see not only what your clients think of you but also what professional photographers think of you and your work. It serves to reinforce a clients decision to hire someone for a paying job. For wedding photographers this is absolutely huge to give you a step up on a competitor.
Our photo sharing application allows photographers to upload their photos with rather huge sizes. If the person so desires they can either allow or disallow the photos to have comments or to be physically rated by other photographers.
We are hoping by the end of this week to have the website linked with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
What does this mean? Simple. You can update your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn through our site all at the same time.
It's about making a real full time dedicated social community. Not one that pushes advertising and intentionally sells their users' information for a fraction of a penny.
As for the launch we wanted a slow launch. It was necessary to see what our server requirements were going to be. As of today we have some large google campaigns running all over the place.
To say bad things about the site prior to trying it we feel would be just wrong though. We worked hard to make something that was different and would be a relatively complete solution.