The eagerly anticipated P1XELS Social Network has launched. Official opening day was November 29, the seven-year anniversary of the launch of the original site, pixelsatanexhibition.com, which has remained, curiously, the only curated site for mobile photography and the arts. It’s been an invigorating journey and we are so excited to take to the next level and, hopefully, turn it over to the community.

The new P1XELS site offers the curated feed and the {daily pic} with poetry and music you have all come to know and love. P1XELS has discovered and championed countless new artists over the years and now we want to expand the coverage, cast a wider net, and create a place for iphoneographers, mobile photographers, iphonic artists, video artists, filmmakers. everybody who uses pixels to create art that moves minds and hearts.

The new P1XELS is free, although some premium features are in the works. All users have a profile page where they can build galleries and share images and videos and do facebook-like posts. They also can befriend people, post on their pages. There are public forums for discussion of all sorts of photography, art, philosophical, spiritual, and technical topics.

Just like Facebook, there is newsfeed featuring your friends posts and comments. Also, you view all site activity, or filter it as you wish. And the very coolest thing is that you can see every picture that is coming in to the site in real time. It’s really wonderful!

We are creating a new emphasis on video and are hoping to attract the iOS “painting” community as well.

It’s a beautiful site, if I do say so myself— we are getting really positive feedback and everybody seems to love the new logo (t-shirts coming soon!)—and works really well on a phone or iPad.

We are porting over all the beautiful content from the late, lamented iPhotographer Magazine (renamed P1XELS now) and we will have a companion publication in the Apple Newsstand in the not-too-distant future.

The aim is to build a new community  as a robust alternative to Facebook’s algorithmic shenanigans and to continue as the only permanent and searchable archive of the mobile arts.

The old site, which contains twenty-nine thousand images dating back to 2009, will become a searchable archive.

Join us over at the P1XELS Social Network. You’ll be most welcome!