One year ago, we published a couple of posts on Fanpop, a Web 2.0 startup with a focus on sharing and commenting on links. A lot has happened over at Fanpop since then: It’s not all about links anymore, there are videos, articles, polls and more.

And while the most obvious perk a year ago was sharing links on your favorite topic, today Fanpop is a community, a social networking site with a warm and safe feel to it.

The evolution of Fanpop

When Fanpop was quite new, we had a talk with Dave Lu, who labels himself business guy and HTML monkey at Fanpop. At the time he said:

“We feel like we’re pretty unique from the folksonomy sites in that most of them are strictly bookmarking sites with tags. We actually want to build community-driven portals that include forums and other targeted content like RSS feeds from relevant sources.” And now they have.

Dave comments on the evolution of Fanpop: “What was started as essentially a niche topical social bookmarking site has developed into a site focused on the passions of the community. We are now fostering interaction and content sharing among fandoms. So now if you have fan art you’d like to share or an opinion you’d like to voice, you can immediately find an audience of fellow fanatics who appreciate and understand it.”

I find the new and improved Fanpop quite addictive and I would like to know to what Dave attributes this new atmosphere:

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