social networks

Social Media Infographic

I remember seeing thin a form of a tweet, but it’s so much better as an infographic:

Those of you who know me, know that I am a big fan of Flickr. I’ve been using it for years, and I have more than 10,000 photos upload there. I am also a big fan of Google. And even so, I ignored and disregarded their Picasa service. Why? Because it is boring.

Flickr is a fresh and very much unique solution to the photo sharing problem. It is a photostream. It is social with all the commends and groups. It helps with organization of photos by sets, collections, and tags. It utilizes EXIF image data. It allows to geotag pictures. It was one of the first to introduce easy Creative Commons licensing. And more.

Picasa is very straightforward and … boring. Create albums, upload images, share the selected. That was pretty much it. Later on of course comments came in, geotagging was implemented, and even face recognition was added. Sort of. The strength of Picasa was not in the web service. It was in the photo management application that you’d install on your computer. And that was exactly what I never wanted to do.

My computer is unreliable. It crashes, and dies, and gets outdated. It runs out of disk space. I lose it. And I can’t really share and discuss things off my computer with other people. I can, but it’s not easy or convenient. Flickr solves my problem – I upload pictures there, and everyone can see, comment, and reuse them.

That however created a new problem for me. Since I know that other people will look at my photos, I want to edit them a bit before uploading – crop, contrast, saturation. Things like that. But when I take a lot of pictures at once – event or travel – I have to work a lot to process them. If I get several events in a row, I get stuck, overload, and lose interest. Like now, for example. I still have photos from my 2009 trips that I haven’t uploaded anywhere.

A few days ago, I realized that there might be a workable scenario for me with Picasa. Picasa these days is much more feature rich than it used to be. It still lacks the social functionality, but it offers something more for photo management. Picnick – an online photo editor. With that, I can upload all my photos to Picasa as soon as I have them. I can keep them in a private album, edit them when I have the time, and then share them later. Or share them immediately and edit them later – there is less social pressure because there is less social interactions and functionality.

On top of that, Picasa is better working with my new Android phone. I already use it to backup photos from my phone. Having their all photos together makes sense.

One other thing that Picasa does better – uploads. Both services have API, so there are plenty of tools to move pictures around. But I always prefer the simplest solution. Flickr provides five file upload fields on their site. If I need to upload few hundreds of pictures, I’ll spend too much time with that. I am, sort of, forced to install an application or a browser plugin or something. Picasa web albums allows to select multiple files for upload – as many as you have in the folder. So in just a couple of clicks I can select and start the upload and come back later when it’s done.

Having seen all that in the last few days, I decided to try it out. I am no uploading all my photos to Picasa as well. I’ll keep them in private albums for now. If I like it enough, I’ll share them later.

What about you? Where do you keep your photos? How do you share them? And are you happy with your current setup?

YouTube Social

The idea of social television is not particularly new. People have been watching TV together for years. Now that a lot of entertainment is moving online, social digital TV is a cool idea. I’ve heard about a few attempts to implement it before, but I haven’t actually seen one up-close. Via Download Squad I’ve learned today about YouTube Social. I think it’s pretty cool, even though it’s definitely not perfect.

It’s really simple to try. Just go to YouTube Social and search for videos using a familiar YouTube interface. Either play them immediately or add them to the queue. If you have a Facebook account, authorize YouTube Social to use it, so that you could add friends to your session easily. If you don’t have Facebook account or don’t fancy the authorization, you can still use YouTube Social. It’s just that you and your friends will be assigned anonymous names like ‘guest123’. You can either send your friends a tiny URL to join the session or an automated Facebook chat invite.

When your friends join the session, you are all watching videos synchronized. Which means that all of you see the same video at the same time. And you can talk about it in the chat window while you are watching it. User with the remote control can pause, play, and find more videos to watch. The remote control is just a token, which can be passed around like a regular remote control. Overall, pretty awesome!

There are really only a couple of things that I didn’t enjoy – chat only works with Latin characters (Cyrillic simply don’t show at all) and the Facebook-only login option (no Twitter/Google/etc). The user interface could use some polish, and I’m sure it will get some in the near future.

Overall, a very nice execution of the idea in demand.

Twitter is not a social network

Just a couple of days ago I had a discussion with a friend of mine about Twitter. He is not too much into social networks, but hearing all the time about Twitter, he decided to give it a shot again, and still felt that it was in no way suitable for him. Normally, that would be enough for me to jump into my zealotical advocacy mode. However this time I felt different. I said that I’m not all that hot about Twitter anymore as I used to be.

You see, back in a day, Twitter had two things important to me, that it lost on the way to where it is now. The first one was SMS gateway. People could interact with Twitter via SMS. This was important to me, because I could practically get anybody register at Twitter. My grandparents know how to send SMS, using their pre-historic mobile phones. Also, SMS coverage is way better, more reliable, and cheaper than any mobile Internet connection. Unfortunately, Twitter limited its SMS gateway from global coverage to only a selection of countries (US, UK, etc), which don’t include the countries where I or my friends and family live. A huge disappointment.

Secondly, back in a day, Twitter was about status updates. That was partially enforced by the SMS user interface, where you just couldn’t assume that everyone has a browser nearby or even an Internet connection. So the messages were more of the text and less of the links. With SMS gateway going away, and with plenty of online marketing and PR people joining Twitter, this was also gone. Now, most Twitter messages contain a link to an external resource.

I think that that also changed the culture of a place. Before, 140 character limitation had a very good reason to be in place – that’s how many characters there are in an SMS message. People were encouraged to formulate their updates within this limit. Now that Twitter updates are mostly links, nobody cares about that limit. Why would I want to limit myself to 140 characters, when I can use as much of them as I want and just tweet a link to my text?

So, if it’s not a social network with status updates anymore, what is it? A news source? But we had RSS for that, didn’t we? Yes, we did, and we still do. But RSS works differently. RSS is more of a source-based system. You pick your sources that you trust and want to follow – CNN, Slashdot, etc – and you subscribe to their RSS feed. This will make sure that you get all published items, whether you are online or not. If you’ve got a new interest or hobby – just find a few more sources of wisdom and subscribe to their RSS feeds. Handling too much? Just unsubscribe from some and you done.

Twitter is different. It’s not so much as a source-based system, but an event-based system. It doesn’t matter who you follow and what your interests are. If something happens, you’ll know about it on Twitter. A gadzillion people will tweet and re-tweet about it, and you will eventually catch it. Or you can search for keywords that you have interest in, and then it will work very much like Google Alerts, letting you know about tweets that matched, no matter who or where posts them.

I am, personally, not a big news person. I don’t care much about news. What I care about are opinions and thoughts about news. So for me personally, Twitter is not that interesting, because it only tells me what happens. Slashdot and a collection of my other two hundred or so feeds tell me what happened and what people think about it.

For the last year or so, I only new that I am floating away from Twitter. Yes, it’s there. Yes, it’s getting more and more popular. Yes, I’m pushing a bunch of links to it too – my blog posts announcements, some delicious bookmarks, an YouTube favorites. Occasionally I even tweet a thought or a quote. But I don’t read and follow it as much as I used to. For the last couple of weeks or so, I was trying to figure out why, and now I think I have.

But until today that was only me and my thoughts. Today however I got a confirmation of my thoughts being in the right direction.

Kevin Thau, Twitter’s VP for business and corporate development, announced during a presentation at Nokia World 2010 today that everyone’s favorite micro-blogging network is not actually a social network.

It’s not, you say?

No, says Thau: Twitter is for news. Twitter is for content. Twitter is for information.

ReadWriteWeb is one of many resources reporting from Nokia World 2000.