We mentioned Desktop Nexus nearly a year ago, as a Flickr-like image sharing site for desktop backgrounds. Desktop Nexus has been working on a few improvements to the site, and is now relaunching as more of a community site than a simple place to upload and download images for your computer background.
With a deeper focus on community, Desktop Nexus is in fact looking to provide users with more control over the images they upload. That means that users can now moderate comments left on their images, add titles and descriptions, as well as edit their uploads at a later point in time.
The thing about building out its community is that Desktop Nexus also needs to improve its search capabilities. Desktop Nexus has begun to do so, with the inclusion of Related Wallpapers and tag for a more circular browsing experience. There's some more work that can be done on this end but I think Desktop Nexus is moving in the right direction, doing something different in creating a community-focused sharing site with recommendations for such a niche image-sharing audience.
Admittedly, the relaunched Desktop Nexus is much friendlier and has more of a media-sharing feel to it. But this relaunch does remind us that a lot of services out there feel the need to launch social networks. At this point, there's a difference between launching a social network for a particular service, and layering in integrated social capabilities that are also tied in with existing social networks.