When I connected to my homepage, today, I saw Annjin's avatar turned to the default icon.

A very sad discovery, because Ann was one of the first artists I met on Ipernity and I didn't know her from the Flickr era.

In the last week there was a post on her blog about disappearing members (perhaps it is still on What's Hot...). In her words I found a great disillusion about Ipernity's future and this move out of the game don't surprise me so much, but anyway for me it is a painful situation when I see disappear a person with whom I had almost daily contacts in the last year. We have other ways to keep in touch and I'm sure she will walk our streams as anonymous visitor from time to time.

I feel that Ipernity is living a growth crisis: too similar to Flickr to avoid comparisons, too different to satisfy who's searching for a Flickr clone (but without the dreaded Yahoo 'infamy mark').

I love Ipernity community and, at the same time, I can live without: I need a place to express myself and Ipernity is a good technologic platform (as a former programmer I have my websites with installed blogs, CMS, wiki, gallery and so on, but Ipernity take away all the hassles of maintaining such a software mess...).

I hope this hemorrhage of familiar faces will come to an end and I wish Team Ipernity will have far-sightedness in choosing next moves...

My head keeps telling me this is (virtual) life, my heart keeps suffering...