Ok, I admit it: I'm one of the 90% of creative professionals who have Adobe Photoshop installed... in fact, I rely on a number of Adobe products every day.  And I'm sure that you also rely on an app or technology create by Adobe, or something created with an Adobe product.  But, did you know that a million design and dev folks use Flash, that three million use Dreamweaver, and that Adobe's got the number 2 spot on Fortune's Most Admired Companies 2009 list?  What a brand.  What a community.

As someone with a design background, you can imagine how thrilled I was when we were presented with the opportunity to work with Adobe to help design, launch, and power their international groups community... something that we can finally (as of today's announcement) toot the horn about!  Take a look: http://groups.adobe.com

Before going into more detail, you have to meet two of the folks behind Adobe Groups, and with whom we've had the great pleasure of working: Ted Patrick and Rachel Luxemburg.  Ted manages developer communites and events, and Rachel is the Community Manager for Groups.  And, as you'll see in a moment, they've certainly rolled up their sleeves and pulled off some exciting things when it comes to building community.  The back-story: they launched Adobe Groups on HiveLive's LiveConnect Community Platform at their recent MAX conference in San Fancisco.  Since then, the community has been growing and picking up steam.  Here are a few stats:

• Adobe Groups is now over 23,000 members strong with thousands of new folks joining every month
• Each user group (think passionate customers organizing by product and by geography) has a dedicated area within the community that supports specific activities such as blogging, discussions, event calendaring, job listing, and more
• Each group is launched, configured, and managed by members themselves (decentralized management strategy)... which means that Rachel and team get a lot of help from their own customer base when it comes to keeping the ecosystem living and breathing
• Adobe launched the community with around 200 registered groups, and now support over 700 (3x growth overall, 8x growth internationally)

If you'd like to explore more of what they're doing, here are a couple interesting places to start browsing:

• Watch Adobe's video introducing Groups
• Start at the top: http://groups.adobe.com (you can create an Adobe user account to log in)
• Browse groups by geography (e.g., North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, Pacific, India)
• Explore how community events and job listings roll up from local listings to the global community level
• See how different each group can be... e.g., compare: animotion nm, TAUG in Thailand, and ActionScript 3.cn in China

Hats off to Adobe's commitment to community.