…and I really only say that because FriendFeed is one of those rare services that has the ability to convey a strong sense of culture that’s relevant to the user.  It doesn’t try to pollute it or dilute it or otherwise overpower it with a corporate branding effort like, say, Facebook.  When you’re logged into FriendFeed and have a group of folks with which you’re familiar with added to your circle, you can’t help but feel a little like you’re home.

DeviantArt portrays the same sort of feeling of community and strong culture, without being overbearing  in nature. DeviantArt has been around a whole lot longer than FriendFeed, of course, and has had time to cultivate it’s very strong community (back when they still called them communities, instead of social networks); I’ve been a member of the service since 2003, myself.

I recently had a chance to sit down and talk about the history of DeviantArt with one of it’s founders, still active in the company, Angelo Sotira.Given the fact that despite having an immense userbase that’s been creating tens of millions of art pieces for the last eight years, they’ve recieved surprisingly little press. Angelo and I discussed why that is (hint: it’s by design), a little bit of their history, and perhaps most interestingly how their culture has adapted to the new popularity of Web 2.0 and social media.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

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