Hi Neverhurry,
Deviantart has been around for years and is the #1 art/creative resource on the internet. It has been in development for many many years and as far as I know it has been custom built from the ground up. The site has thousands and thousands of users and so the people behind the site have enough resources (read: money) to make an incredible site, so it would take you a lot of time and money to achieve something like deviantart. I won’t say it’s impossible with WPMU+BP but it would require a LOT of work.
Bowe, thank you so much for the info. It’s very helpful.
I would say you could create something better than DeviantArt. I love the site but its kinda clunky in UI. What is it really if you break it down? Profiles with ability to display content. you can do that with WPMU user blogs via custom themes and plugins or DEV the whole front of BP to mimic the functionality of DA.
@Modemlooper, you hit the nail right on the head! Yesterday night I spent a lot of time on DA studying their structure. Every member has a subdomain, for example, http://dwdesignsolutions.deviantart.com/ which WPMU can achieve easily. Under this subdomain, they have a enhanced profile page, a gallery, a prints page, a favorite page, and a Journal page which is actually a blog. For the enhanced profile pages and the site home page one needs some php and mysql knowledge to draw out data from database which should not be very difficult… for me it is much more difficult to make the theme (skin) i am very bad at color combination.
regards
@neverhurry http://www.colourlovers.com/
Also check this site. http://rideoregonride.com It’s on BP yet has used it in a completely different way than the basic install.
Seeing how big (in users and content) deviantArt is and how “easy” it is to use, I would give up on making such a website. Even if you come with a better concept or a better UI, they’ll notice you and build their own even better. It’s a war you cannot win. Just like it’s impossible for Bing to ever beat Google.
What you could do is make such a site for a specific user group or specific country and see how that works, here (netherlands) we still have a social network that is used more then facebook and those users wont jump over to facebook anytime soon either. That network (hyves) is only based on the Dutch people and is most likely therefore still more populair.
If your website start growing and users show interest, then you can think about building your site bigger and better then the big bad competitors.
Like all populair sites, start small and see where it goes.
Seeing how big (in users and content) deviantArt is and how “easy” it is to use, I would give up on making such a website. Even if you come with a better concept or a better UI, they’ll notice you and build their own even better. It’s a war you cannot win. Just like it’s impossible for Bing to ever beat Google.
That has got to be the worst advice I’ve ever heard. So basically people should just give up there sites as somebody has already done it?
Better advice is don’t reinvent the wheel. Sure nobody will use another search engine but they may use a search engine for a certain topic.
Apple will never beat out windows and they don’t care too. They offer something premium. User Experience.
Also check this site. http://rideoregonride.com It’s on BP yet has used it in a completely different way than the basic install.
@Modemlooper, thank you so much. Very helpful!
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That has got to be the worst advice I’ve ever heard. So basically people should just give up there sites as somebody has already done it?
Better advice is don’t reinvent the wheel. Sure nobody will use another search engine but they may use a search engine for a certain topic.
Apple will never beat out windows and they don’t care too. They offer something premium. User Experience.
@Modemlooper, I appreciate very much your opinion, encourages me a lot~!
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What you could do is make such a site for a specific user group or specific country and see how that works,
@xevo, yeah, that is a good idea!
If you’d read the post properly Modemlooper you would see that Xevo is making the exact same point you were making.. No point in copying something exactly and trying to target the exact same market as the big bad competition. It’s much better to focus on a specific subgroup of that huge pile of users..
He’s not saying; don’t try.. he’s saying; try, but don’t copy and target a specific subgroup of the big bad competition and see where it goes 
ha ha I know. It just came off like they suggested don’t even bother trying to compete. Competition is good for google even if you are small time. Twitter has a VERY small percentage of users compared to google yet google is worried about Twitters real time search. hmm seem you can compete with a giant.
