/ 3 October 2010

A Flickr of interest

Many people, said the web's inventor this week, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web.

Facebook has more pictures than Flickr, writes John Naughton, but does anyone really want to look at them?

At a Royal Society symposium on web science this week, Tim Berners-Lee let slip an interesting observation. Many people, said the web’s inventor, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web. My guess is that these people are mainly teenagers — those whose experience of cyberspace is coloured by the fact that the first thing they encountered online was social networking. They started with Bebo and MySpace and then graduated to Facebook. And there they have stayed.

So, for them, Facebook is where it’s at. That explains why they no longer use email, for example, except — grudgingly — to collect official communications from school or college. Most of their electronic communications are routed either via text messaging or Facebook updates. Almost all teenage party invitations now come via Facebook, which has also become the logbook of their lives. When it was announced a couple of weeks ago that Flickr, the photo-hosting site, had hosted its five billionth picture, someone pointed out smugly that Facebook already has over three times that number.

The trouble is that many of those 15-billion pictures look very similar. A few days ago I ran into one of my nieces whom I hadn’t seen for a while. She’s a lively, sociable young woman and had recently returned from spending an enjoyable summer in Cape Cod. I asked if she had any photographs. “Sure,” she said, launching her Facebook page, where there was an album of 150 images, which on inspection turned out to be a succession of more or less identical images of young men and women wearing silly grins and making faces at the camera.

Facebook photography
Two things struck me about this album. The first was that it contained not a single image of Cape Cod. The other was how her photographs reminded me of those which appear on the Facebook pages of my own teenage children — which leads one to conjecture that there is now a “Facebook style” of photography, as distinctive in its way as that of the passport or wedding photograph.

Many parents are astonished, nay horrified, by this Facebook style which, they fear, will endanger their children’s employment prospects. After all, are not the tabloids full of stories of job applicants being confronted at interview with images, taken from Facebook albums, of themselves in flagrante? But I suspect that this is a generational concern; what today’s parents forget is that tomorrow’s interview panels will comprise people who were themselves once captured in flagrante on Facebook — and will therefore have a lower shock-horror threshold.

Adult concerns about the way teenagers wittingly — or unwittingly — compromise their privacy on Facebook rest on more solid foundations. The company’s eventual prosperity depends on being able to sell personal details to advertisers, and so the site’s default privacy settings are set to maximise the probability that those details will be available. Mark Zuckerberg and co know that something like 90% of internet users tend to accept the default settings on their software.

A wonder of the world
Among Facebook’s 15-billion photographs there are, no doubt, some memorable and beautiful images, but to date I haven’t seen any. That’s not true of Flickr, which continues to be one of the wonders of the world and hosts hundreds of thousands of terrific pictures. More significantly, an increasing proportion of them are published under a Creative Commons licence, which means that they can be freely used for non-commercial purposes. This means that Flickr has become an astonishing resource for anyone who needs pictures for presentations or other purposes.

As an example of what’s now possible as a result is Fotopedia Heritage which is basically the world’s first endless coffee-table book. It came from an idea by Jean-Marie Hullot, who was chief technology officer of NeXT, the company Steve Jobs set up when he was ousted from Apple in 1985. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Hullot came with him and played some unspecified role in the resuscitation of the company’s product lines.

After retiring from Apple, he had a neat idea: to gather CC-licensed images of Unesco world heritage sites from Flickr, select the best and blend them with text drawn from Wikipedia and Unesco to create a ravishing — and free — iPad and iPhone app. At one level, the app is just an amazing example of what can be done with user-generated content. But it’s also an indicator of how time-honoured genres might be enhanced. At its best, the elaborate, beautifully printed coffee-table book is one of the glories of Gutenberg’s technology. But such books are expensive, heavy and finite. M Hullot’s venture reminds one that books no longer have to be limited in size: his app can continue to expand as more good images become available. But somehow I can’t see them ever coming from Facebook. – guardian.co.uk