Filed under: social media
Back in the day, before digital cameras and constant high-speed internet connections, we had reason to worry about photos. In those days, just over 10 years ago, an awkward picture might be the only representation people saw of us in coffee table photo albums. But now, with so many tagged photos on Facebook, what's the real impact of a single bad one?
My siblings, a friend, and I discussed this over Christmas and recently, a photographer friend posted his own take on it. As someone who carries an SLR with him to social gatherings, he's often had to duck and take cover after snapping shots. People would swarm him with preview requests and warn him of posting less-than-flattering pics on Facebook.
But I don't think they matter anymore. Well, let me not say that. Sometimes one photo does matter.
Like when you're secretly a bigamist.
Or when the "family emergency" you had to miss work for is really a Halloween party.
And you definitely don't want wild party pictures easily accessible when you're searching for a job or on trial for underage drinking and driving.
But for the vast majority of us it's not that crucial. Most of us aren't trying to hide those kind of secrets. Our photo concerns usually come down to one thing, and one thing only: do we look good in them?
Take a look at a random friend's photo counts. How many pictures are tagged? Hundreds? Thousands? Now ask yourself this: when was the last time you looked at only one photo of someone on Facebook? If you can look at more than one photo, you probably will. Others do the same when looking at yours. So even if one is slightly off (exhibit A), the rest will still do a great job of giving off a good aesthetic impression (exhibits B, C and D). Facebook has over 3 billion photos uploaded each month. Chances are, you get tagged in at least one of them. With these kinds of numbers, and with friends being able to see so many of them, do a few bad ones still matter?
Having been found via social media also reiterated the importance of giving tags and descriptive titles to the content we put online. There are so many videos, photos and musings, but not all of them are easy to find. I've stumbled upon plenty of cool stuff that I would've never been able to find using a search engine.
Before moving to Kunohe Village last year, I searched Flickr in hopes of finding photos to give me an idea of what my new home would look like. Despite using different search permutations, I only found about 10 photos to give me a glimpse of the place I'd already committed to living in for a year (though it did make it more of an adventure!).
Today, the same search returns over 100.
And because of that, future residents and visitors of that 7,000-person village can get a better idea of what it looks like ahead of time.
Regardless of what your content is, please remember to tag it! You never know who will benefit from it in the future.
Today I met a b-boy who is going to be a new English teacher around my old stomping grounds in rural northern Japan.
What's interesting is the way he found me and how much social media played a part in it. He searched Youtube for Ninohe, the name of a city in the area, and found a video I had posted from a dance event hosted there last year. Upon seeing one of my related videos, he discovered that I also bboyed. Then he went to Bboyworld, one of the largest breaking web forums around, searched for the same user name from Youtube, found my profile, and contacted me from there.
From a 90's standpoint, this is the stuff we were warned about; be wary of putting too much information online and being found. But with the change in attitude that's come with the web's acceptance, this is exactly what we hope for.
Rural Japan, with it's declining population of which only a handful of whom speak English, can be a difficult area to settle into, let alone find other b-boys. But by using social media, he was able to find a shortcut: I'll be passing along the info of b-boys, b-girls and English speakers in the area.
What a reminder of the networking power of social media and the web.
About a month and a half ago, I created a twitter bot, @tweologian, that searches the Twittersphere for religious-oriented tweets and retweets them. I've always had a fascination with religion and thought it'd be interesting to see how people talked about faith on Twitter. For example, here are some retweets from the last 24 hours:
- RT @: Religion IS Restriction -
- RT @: **NEWSFLASH** didn't hang with perfect people.
- RT @: RT @: RT @ I Love Allah, I Love Muhammad, I Love Islam and I Love My Dad ♥
- RT @: Christianity-The First Two Thousand Years
- RT @: RT @: BuddhaNet Audio: Buddhist Meditation
People are pretty open on Twitter so there have been some really interesting tweets. But another interesting part has been the response!
After creating it (with this PHP bot framework) and setting it to auto-follow any new followers, I took my hands off and let it run. I didn't expect to attract too much attention but almost immediately, people started reacting to the tweets.
Most were positive: I've been been retweeted, recommended on Follow Friday, blessed and engaged. But there's also been some negative ones: I've been questioned, accused, cursed at (again and again and again) and even threatened. Don't shoot the messenger!
After about 3,900 tweets, I have close to 500 followers and have been added to a handful of lists. I'm going to continue running the bot in the same, hands-off way while studying the reactions, but for now, I've gotten a couple of key take-aways:
- People are still very vocal about their faiths and Twitter makes it easy to share their beliefs with the world.
- The best way to get someone's attention--for better or for worse--is through a retweet.
I professed my love for 750words.com a few posts back but found something else pretty interesting about the site: you can only log on with 3rd party accounts. There's no native user account system; you're forced to use Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect or Yahoo!ID.
This is the first time I've ever seen a web app configured this way and it has both its upsides and downsides:
The pros: Less code to maintain and one less username/password for users to remember
The cons: 3rd party dependency/limitations and a lack of user anonymity
The most interesting part is the lack of user anonymity, that is, forcing users to use their real names or ID's (though people can still create fake handles at those sites). It's probably not a huge concern for most 750words users since the application is not heavily community-centric (by default, your posts are private), but I wonder...how would this approach affect other sites and apps?
Here's the dilemma: for community sites, there's "an inverse relationship between the level of anonymity and quality of conversation". But at the same time, when you disallow anonymity, people are less likely to participate, meaning you might not have a conversation anyway.
Both approaches come with consequences. But with the growing popularity of Facebook, Google and other sites that let users take their accounts elsewhere, maybe the trade-off is worth it.
For community/social sites where real names are the norm (e.g., LinkedIn), why create a native user account system when most users already use those other sites? And for sites that advocate dialog and conversation, could losing anonymous posters be written off as collateral damage if the health of the community's conversation has an overall upswing?
There will always be a place for anonymity because some sites--especially those related to anything taboo--just can't survive without it. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of sites without their own user account systems continue to increase in the future.
Conventional wisdom warns against mass social network befriendment for privacy reasons. But high friend counts can also limit how well you stay stay in touch with people.
Some years back, I stumbled upon the notion to start using Facebook primarily as a means of networking. With that goal in mind, I started adding everyone I remembered meeting and accepting requests from anyone I had friends in common with (the assumption being that we had probably met). And to support this, I also adjusted my privacy settings to share less and scrubbed my profile of too many details. If I was gonna have my profile open to so many, I'd have to cater to the most distant "friend".
By the time I came to Japan, I had nearly 1,000 friends. But it was coming to Japan that made me realize how detrimental this networking idea was.
No longer able to attend weddings, be physically present for parties or live in a timezone conducive to American conversations, FB became a life line to keep up with people. And that's when I really started noticing how cluttered it was. The low signal to noise ratio had me missing new photos and updates. Instead, I'd log on and be bombarded with FarmVille updates from old coworkers I hadn't spoken with in 4 years.
The privacy thing crept up too. I realized just how uncomfortable I was sharing pictures and details of my experience when peeps I hadn't seen or really spoken with since junior high could also see them. It wasn't a big deal in the states because I didn't share much info then. I had been using FB more as a glorified address book. But with an ocean between myself and everyone else, I found a status update or new photo could go a long way to shorten the distance.
To their credit, FB has made significant strides with their privacy and redesign efforts to deal with this problem, but my new philosophy is that a social network as personal as theirs should be kept as personal as possible.
LinkedIn is great for business and Twitter is cool for everything else. But for those highly individualized social interactions, FB just can't be beat.
At over 350 Million users, it's tempting to use FB for networking. And with their Friend Suggestion and Friend Finder tools, they make that especially easy to do. However, in this case, the age-old addage of quality over quantity pops up again. I believe that FB's value increases when you share and connect only with those most important to you.
Facebook. Myspace. Twitter. The list goes on...
It's funny how times change. Just a few years ago, we were afraid to put our personal information online. We were warned against having our last names on the internets. That our lives would be infiltrated at the drop of any personal data. We feared the strangers on the other end of modems.
But now we volunteer it. As we should. There's no stopping information; it'll come out sooner or later. And by trying to remain private, we relinquish control of our internet identities to whatever search engines index. But by accepting the web's new world order, we take the first step towards defining them.
We should make sure that if people search for us, they find what we want them to see.
|
