What site is this?

Recently I was invited to give a talk on Social Media and particularly Facebook. The talk was for a business network, and it was at their weekly breakfast meeting. Normally my assistant does complete SMC (Social Media Coverage) of all my talks – including photos and video footage. This was a small talk though, so I went alone, with only my digital camera. Just before my talk I kindly asked the fellow next to me to snap a few shots of me during my presentation. He did so, and perfectly. Then I took some more shots of the rest of the event.

At the end, the event organizer asked me to email the photos to her because she had forgotten her camera at home that morning. I did send her the photos, but not via email. I sent her a link to the photoset on Flickr. Photos of all our events go up on both Flickr and Facebook. Facebook is excellent for exposure and attention, but Flickr is better for sharing.

Flickr keeps all photos at the resolution it was taken (and we always take photos at a very high resolution), and allows you to share those photos with anyone, while also automatically offering the user 5 additional photo sizes to download. This is extremely handy. When sharing photos it’s easier to share them online, because you might end up emailing the photos to a number of people, repeating the same task, and extending your bandwidth usage, unnecessarily. It’s also a good repository of photos if you ever need them when you’re away from your computer, or if you ever lose your originals. Although Facebook has a bigger tally of photos, the fact that it decreases the resolution of every single photo can sometimes be inadequate because most times we need high resolution photos.

When I sent the lady the email with the Flickr link, she was amazed at the site, and emailed back saying, “What site is this?” This was another reminder of how we in the Web industry take for granted the tools that we use everyday. I don’t believe that Web 2.0 is hype. I believe that Web 2.0 is extremely valuable to everyone in the world. We can do so many things now that were literally impossible a few years ago. I think we’ve taken big leaps in many areas – communication, marketing, productivity, and others.

Content is still king – but who’s content?

[Ok, so I haven't blogged in a while. A tad hypocritical of me since I advocate blogging so strongly in my talks. Each time I get an idea for a blog post (which is usually more than once a day) I shift it aside and make something else priority, I think I need to change that, now!]

Ever since the start of the Internet, we’ve been saying that “Content is king” – and that’s been very true. A website with more content – be it text or any other type of content – always won over a website with no content. The content surely had to be good, make no mistake. As the Internet has evolved, I think the content paradigm has evolved as well.

I caught an interesting link on Twitter last night, it was a recent TechCrunch article titled: “Facebook Is Now the Fourth Largest Site In The World.” Facebook boasts 340 million unique visitors during June, 2009. This article returned a memory from a few months ago. I was consulting with a client and helping them understand how Facebook could help their business. I was setting up one lady’s Facebook profile, and it looked very strange. There was nothing going on there, there was more white screen than anything else. This was because she had not “connected” to many friends at the time, so there was little information displaying on her profile. I mentioned this to them, explained how “busy” my profile is, and we had a chuckle, but it’s stayed in my memory – perhaps waiting for me to write this post?!

Content is still the most important component of a website – but who’s content is an entirely new question! We visit Facebook every single day, several times a day, from our desktops, laptops, and mobiles. Who’s content are we looking at though? Facebook’s? Very rarely. We’re looking at content that we’ve created ourselves, or content that our friends have created. Twitter? Twitter without user content is an empty shell. When we go to YouTube, are we viewing their content? Nope. Flickr? Wikipedia?

User-generated content is what really drives the Internet today. And it’s going to get bigger, and bigger. Facebook et al will need to continually make it easier for users (that’s you and me) to publish our own content and share others’ content. It’s about the content, still, but there’s been a shift in who publishers that content.