It’s hardly news, but Matt Haughey (and the team – Josh Millard, Jessamyn West, and Paul Bausch) has build one of the web’s great online communities over the years. In the last little while, they have been quietly adding a raft of really great community-building features.

One example unveiled today: Profile Photos of MeFites – succinctly introduced by Matt: “updated nightly, a dump of everyone’s uploaded profile photo”. Doesn’t seem like much, perhaps, compared to the latest chump-biting app from Facebook (!) or whatever – but the sum of this plus the rest of the new features is far greater than the parts. In a web full of “communities” that seem to be defined as narrowly and shallowly as possible, MetaFilter is a beacon of what the “social web” can be.