14 DAY TRIAL // 4chan, Christopher Poole's first creation, may not be to everyone's liking, to say the least, but its popularity with a certain, rather large, number of people is undeniable. Now Poole, aka "moot," thinks he can strike again with Canvas, a new photo sharing site built around some of the things that make 4chan so popular, the community and "remixed" images.
The site is now live and a small group of people have now been invited to join. It's a small group for now, but others will be added in batches. New users will also get invitations to send to others, later on.
"Today we’re happy to announce the first public release of Canvas," Poole wrote on the Canvas blog.
"We’ve had a lot of fun playing with it amongst ourselves and with our friends, and look forward to seeing how others use it and all that we’ll learn and tweak in the coming weeks. Our goal is to create the best place to share and play with images," he added.
The site enables users to upload images and others to comment, interact or modify it and then upload their version. This doesn't sound all that different from 4chan, in essence.
However, the one big difference is that there will be user profiles, everything you upload is listed on your profile page. But, besides the files, there is nothing else to form an identity, users are still essentially anonymous.
In order to attract users that may not want to actually create the images but still want to interact, there are also "stickers" which they can add to the photos. The stickers can be simple, "like," "dislike," "LOL," "number 1" and so on, but also more subtle.
Only a few thousands of people have been invited in this first stage, but the site will open up gradually to more users, as new features and functionality are added. "Canvas in its current form represents just a kernel of our long-term vision for the site, and we couldn’t be more excited about what’s in store," Poole writes.