If you’re a frequent visitor to 23hq.com you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been a bit silent lately. And there’s a good reason for that. We’ve been busy building a series of new products based on the core of our personal photo sharing site — and we’re finally ready to let the world have a look at the wonder of it all.

This is where I should warn you. We have a lot to say, and I’m probably going to ramble a bit over the next few paragraphs. The gist of it can be boiled down to two statements though: 23 as a company is launching more photo sharing products aimed a different target audiences. 23hq.com as a service is getting better.

The longer story is quite simple, actually: Many years back (in a land so far away they tend to call it 2003) we started building a simple photo sharing service aimed at ordinary people who wanted to share their digital photos with their families and friends, and over time that experiments grew into 23hq.com. The service is still targeted at those same, ordinary people — let’s call them you and me — but we’ve also realised that the benefits of photos and of visual communication isn’t limited to personal communities.

A while back we began seeing different creative usages of 23 in organizational contexts, which expanded the boundaries of our understanding of visual sharing. Being curious, we helped quite a few corporations and organizations to get started in the world of visual communication, and we’ve gotten many more questions from others who wanted to utilize the medium for professional or corporate use. This journey has let us to add more products to our portfolio of tools, and it has lead us to a commitment to fulfill the needs for visual sharing across industries and across organisational processes.

The pioneering steps of photo sharing on the Internet has taken one quite specific route, which is almost exclusively focused on people sharing personal photos with their peers and building strong communities through those photos. The result has been a plurality of great tools for that very purpose. We’re proud of 23’s place in this crowd, and we’re convinced that we can do even better. (And we will…)

But the result has also been walled gardens of somewhat closed communities with very little opportunity to interact or to control the staging of one’s own photos. This community nature has meant that that photo sharing — unlike other types of blogging or social applications — hasn’t received its due in organisational use. At 23hq.com we’ve done a lot to loosen these constraints by not requiring user accounts in conversations, having very little “23″ and a lot more of “you”, and by letting users use custom designs. We’ve also chosen to support the flickr api for importing or exporting photos and for working with 3rd-party applications. At times this urge to decentralise and open up has stood in opposition to the need to keep 23 simple and focused on the community.

This is why we’ve been redirecting those pesky urges elsewhere for a while. We’ve taken the core of 23hq.com and refitted it for a decentralised world where people, businesses, corporations and organisations do want to utilize the power of visual sharing — but where they want to do it with the largest community of them all, the internet, and not a specific closed walled-garden community.

So, today we’re releasing our second product, 23 VisualBlog, into closed beta. The product is exactly what you’d think from reading the name: a visual blogging tool for people and companies who want the best of blogging and the best of photo sharing. It comes equipped with full customizability both in functionality and in presentation: Multiple sites, multiple users, comment moderation and spam handling, visual comments and unlimited photo upload. Apart from this VisualBlog shares an array of features with 23hq.com such as email/phone uploading, badges, slideshows and open apis. On the presentation-side 23 VisualBlog allows you to use your own domain and to customize the design using a theme engine based only on established web standards. Our third product, VisualCollaboration, the easy way to work together using visual sharing will be coming shortly thereafter.

“Wow, that’s good for you guys — but what’s in it for me?” you might say as an existing user of 23’s community. Well, in the short-run there’s a big upside: When we’ve finished the beta period of 23 VisualBlog (and that’s quite soon) we have loads of improvements to bring back to our loyal customers. There’s a new organiser, a bulk-uploader that actually works and a new scheme for inline editing — just to name a few. In the longer term there’s the advantage of a more self-aware product focused on actually being a community for real persons sharing and interacting with their digital photos.

Thank you for your attention - and please do send an email to team@23visual.com if you want to try out VisualBlog in the closed beta version.

schabloni has set up a nice microsite of stencil streetart. Have a look at streetart.splitbrain.org.