So, if I used Photosync to automatically sync photos I upload to Flickr with Facebook, and then used Move2Picasa to copy my Facebook photos into Picasa/Google Plus, I could pretty much share my photos with people no matter where they follow me, right?

The larger question is whether it’s worth my time and effort though. As of today, I’m not convinced that it would be, but I’m keeping these links in my back pocket (aka this blog post) in case things change.

What about the other photo hobbyists out there? How do you plan to share?

A couple of weeks ago, my wife sent me an email with a link to this PC-Mag article. ???FTC-Approved Company Will Save Dirt from Your Facebook Profile for 7 Years.

My first reaction was that isn’t all that surprising, and people really do need to learn to think before they post anything to a social networking site. Even if you’re only sharing it with a small group, in Google+ Circles for example, nothing is stopping someone from capturing that photo, post, etc. and sharing it elsewhere.

However, when I read the article, part of it really jumped out at me, in a disturbing way.

?Forbes got its hands on a few reports Social Intelligence has made for reporters. One job applicant was indicated to be a racist for joining a Facebook group called “I shouldn’t have to press 1 for English. We are in the United States. Learn the language.”

If that’s the sort of thing that gets you dropped from a potential job, wide-spread use of this service is going to lead to the majority of the country being unemployable. Good luck finding someone who passes this sort of examination hiring managers!

The other thing that this shows is the danger of large, widespread, data collection, especially by government entities. Anytime the subject comes up there’s always the chorus of “If you’re not doing anything wrong, what’s the big deal?” comments to anyone who thinks too much information is being collected. It’s not the data, it’s that someone is going to be interpreting the data completely out of context. Is the Facebook group mentioned above sort of just stupid? Sure. Does joining it make you racist? I think that’s a pretty big stretch, but someone at this company decided that it did, and now the background check run by potential employers is going to come up with you being a racist.

Extrapolate this example out, and you can see how it would be really easy to find information that would hurt you taken out of context. For example, tweeting in support of the US National Team in their recent soccer match with Mexico might be taken as racist, or maybe even anti-immigrant, when taken out of the context of a soccer match. (“C’mon boys beat those Mexicans” sounds somewhat normal during a game, not so much outside of that!). Talking about enjoying a drink after a stressful day might mean you’re a raging alcoholic, looking forward to the weekend might make you a disengaged employee, and on and on. It is all open to interpretation, and if someone can officially label you based on their interpretation, we have problems.

Still, be careful what you put out there. Some things are always stupid.

In the comments on that last post, Steven asks:

Mike, can you post instructions on how to post a pic to fb and restrict it so only 10 of my 100 friends can see it? ’cause I certainly haven’t figured that out yet.

Fair enough, I’ll show you how I did something similar, and then discuss some other options.

After going to my grandmother’s 90th birthday party, I wanted to share some photos of the event, and my family members, with just my family on Facebook.

First, I created a Friend list named Family. From the account menu, select the option to Edit Friends. Right at the top of that screen, there’s a button to “Create a List”.

I created a list named Family, and added my wife, my in-laws, my siblings  and their spouses, my cousins, etc. Once that was complete, I went over to the photos section, and created a new album for the birthday party. With the new album created, I clicked the link to “Edit Album”, which brings up a window where you can set the name, a description, the location and at the very bottom, who it is visible to. It will pick up your default setting from your privacy settings, in my case “Friends Only”, however it can be changed. The drop down will list other defaults, but also has a Customize option. In the new window that opens, again select the drop down next to Friends Only and select the Specific people option In the text box begin typing Family, until that shows up as an option. Select that, and the album is now only viewable to friends that I have added to that list.

That was my preference, because I had already started down the path of creating friend lists and trying to filter my newsfeed using those lists. (A feature that Facebook took out of the iPhone app, and has made much more hidden in the web version than it used to be, by the way!) However, you do not really even need to create lists if you don’t want to. Again, in the Custom sharing you could simply type the name of each friend you want to share the album with, and add them, or you can do the opposite and either create a list, or individuals, that you want to block from seeing it.

BTW, these same privacy settings are available for any status message, shared link, etc. Just click that little lock icon next to the Share button. The only place you do not have this option is on individual photos. The privacy is an album level setting only, as far as I can tell.

So, with some planning and a little digging around, you can get the same functionality within Facebook. I purposely haven’t mentioned Groups here either, because I don’t have any experience with using Groups and don’t know exactly how it works, but I imagine you could do something similar. The one big difference is that people will know they’ve been added to a group, they won’t know if you add them to a list.

Hope that helps!

I know by now that you’ve probably seen a whole bunch of talk about Google’s newest attempt at cracking the social networking market, GooglePlus. I was lucky enough to have a friend send me an invite last night and signed up for the service, and have a few thoughts that I want to talk about before I get to why Google is still going about this all wrong.

First, it seems like most people are excited about the Circles features, which lets you create circles of friends that you can share certain things with, without having to share with everyone. First of all, many of the tech pundits should be ashamed of themselves for suggesting that this feature is one that Facebook does not have. It absolutely does. Between friend lists and groups, you could replicate the functionality of Circles within Facebook, it just isn’t as obvious, or easy to do, as it is with Circles. Circles is front and center as soon as you sign on to Plus. Obviously Google is betting on making that easier is going to differentiate it from Facebook and Twitter.

Will it? I’m not sure. Certainly, it’s an interesting idea. I’m one of those who went to the trouble of setting up friend lists in Facebook, so obviously that is something I want to be able to do. Many early-adopter types are big on that feature, but outside of that demographic, is it really something the typical social network user is clamoring for? Facebook obviously took the opposite tack, betting that people want to be able to share with all of their connections at once, which is obviously much more convenient than trying to create Circles and then decide what to share with which group. I’m just not sure that outside the techie/geeky crowd anyone really cares.

Another problem with Google Plus is that in order to share anything, with anyone, I have to go to the Plus site to share it, and tell it who to share it with. There’s no integration with other social networking tools outside of Google’s own Picasa Photo Sharing. Want to tweet something and also post it to Plus? Nope. Want to update LinkedIn and have it posted to Plus? Nope. Want to automatically import new blogs posts you write? Nope. So instead of simplifying my social networking, it complicates it.

Finally, my biggest gripe with Plus is that I needed an invitation to even take a look at it. Google, once again, is operating like Google always has. It’s put a premium on beta testing, and limiting the number of users in order to remain a stable platform. They fail to understand that the value of any social networking tool is the people in your network. We’ll gladly trade some stability for a wide network of users. (see: Twitter) Google Plus cannot possibly become valuable to me when 95% of the people I am connected with through other means don’t even have access to it. Right now my audience for things I share on Google Plus is 7 people. Seven people who already follow me elsewhere. There is zero incentive for me to log in and share anything there. So I probably won’t, which defeats the purpose of a social networking tool.

So, much like every other attempt Google has made with social networking, there’s some promise there, but until it becomes widely used, and much easier to share things without having to go to the website,  there’s just no point. Perhaps it will prove useful in the future, but I’ve said that about many of Google’s forays into this arena, and it hasn’t happened yet.

I will leave it to the fine folks at Stop Blocking! to skewer the latest report about the “cost” of social networking to business.

I really couldn’t do it any better, but I do want to take a moment and do some math for you.

According to the article, the hour each day an employee spends on social networking site costs ““$10,375 of wasted productivity per person annually”. Which is interesting, and sounds really, really scary.

Except it’s completely disconnected from the real world. In the real world, most people do not put in 8 full hours of non-stop productivity in an 8 hour work day. There are bathroom breaks, brief conversations with coworkers, phone calls, emails, getting up and stretching your legs, etc. All of those things occur during the course of the day, and for most of us, a 40 hour work week is pretty laughable. So, if anything, we’re looking at social networking sites either as part of our job, or during down time, or at the expense of our own day being longer. Not at the expense of productivity, and if someone is truly not being productive, then get rid of them no matter what the reason is!

Let’s do our own study. Let’s assume a 4 member team, and a supervisor. For simplicities sake, lets say the team members make $50,000 per year, and the manager make twice that. Every day, once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, the manager does a check on how things are going, what issues are coming up and where she should expect some problems. She has a 5 minute conversation with each employee, twice a day.

That’s 10 minutes of not being productive per employee.

$50,000/52 weeks/40 hours/60 minutes = .40 cents per minute of salary wasted.

.40 x 10 minutes per day = $4.00 x 5 days per week x 52 weeks per year = $1,040 of salary wasted

x 4 employees = $4,160

For the manager, it’s 40 minutes per day at twice the salary, so $1,040 x 4 x 2 = $8,320 per year.

For a grand total of  $12,480 of lost productivity! Good god, let’s ban managers talking to their reports! It’s killing us! Don’t even get me started on meetings, restroom breaks, phone calls or email!

Of course, it’s not, but my quick example makes as much sense as these stupid social networking/productivity studies, doesn’t it?

This past weekend I attended a little meetup at Lake Conestee. thanks to meetup.com. As I was going through the handful of photos I took at the park, I started to think about online social networking, and how location does affect how you network. As much as the internet and social networking has opened up the possibility of being connected to people no matter their location, sometimes location really does matter.

I look at my online relationships a number of ways. First, there are the people I’m close to, family and friends who I would stay in contact with regardless. For those folks, social networks make it a bit easier to stay up to date with each other despite our locations. Secondly, there are the folks I’ve gotten to know online because we work in the same industry or who are sharing information and tips on things I care about. The last group includes the folks who know what’s going on in your area. As I moved away from Columbus, I began to realize that I was following a whole bunch of folks mostly because they always seemed to know what was going on around town. Now I don’t live there and that information isn’t really relevant anymore, yet somehow I still feel a bit awful for dropping them from my social networks. It’s as if a tiny part of me feels like I’m rejecting them, when in fact they may very well be great people, they are just communicating about things that I’m no longer part of.Maybe I’m just too sensitive, or that Irish Catholic upbringing makes feeling guilty too easy.

On the flip side of that, I now find myself in a new area, and trying to get connected as quickly as possible. That’s why something like meetup, which I grew to disdain when I was in Columbus, for providing me with more information than I wanted, is suddenly very appealing. Now that I’m somewhat on my own out here in the wilderness, more information about what’s going on in the area, and more potential to meet new people, is helpful.

I realize that, as life moves forward, and things change, not only do the relationships you have with people change, but the relationships you have with technologies do as well. Social networks are just tools, there’s no “right” way to use them, and how you use them now may be different a year from now. As long as they are useful tools to help you connect to folks, so be it.

This is an interesting idea. I certainly see the temptation for products to get tagged in photos and get free publicity for their Facebook pages. I’m trying to figure out how I could use it for my blog’s FB pages in fact.;-)

On the other hand, having the opportunity to tag a popular page in your own photo, and have it appear on that page’s feed does open up the possibility of serious spamming. Does anyone remember the Skittles debacle?

Still, with Facebook being a closed infrastructure there are ways to limit some of the risks of spammers and scammers getting their photos to show up on Coke’s Facebook page, but they can’t get rid of it completely. The most they can do is react to the spammers, not prevent it. I do wonder how this is going to work out….

My hope with Twitter purchasing Tweetdeck?

That we don’t have to fear Twitter closing it out, or Tweetdeck creating some weird competitor, and that Twitter will take some of the great features present in Tweetdeck and make them part of the Twitter infrastructure.

My fear?

That some of the great features that help filter the fire hose of Twitter, will get dumped in favor of keeping the “experience” the same on all Twitter clients and the web.

What will actually happen to Tweetdeck? Good question. Any thoughts?

Whenever I’m asked about using social networking tools, inevitably someone asks me if I could see it ever helping someone find a job. I’ve always had to answer that although I have never gotten a job offer due to my online connections, it has led to a number of other opportunities that I would not have been able to experience without those connections.

Now, I may have to change my answer. As I arrive in Greenville and settle into my new home town, I have to say that it was social networking that got me connected to this job, although not directly.

The story starts, actually, in 2009. I was approached by some folks who had read my blog about speaking at the ILTA Annual Meeting on Social Networking. That invitation was purely the result of being involved with online networking. That led to being invited back to do a couple of sessions at ILTA 2010, and it just so happens that the person who was working as a recruiter for this new firm saw me speak there and introduced himself. Late in 2010 he contacted me to ask whether I, or someone I knew, might be interested in relocating South.

So, while I have no evidence that anyone who ultimately made the hiring decision was influenced by my online activities, clearly even being put in front of them was an indirect result of online connections. Which just goes to show that you never know where some connections are going to lead, and that you never know what getting out there and doing something like speaking and sharing your knowledge will lead to. So take advantage of opportunities!

The other day when I saw all the hub-bub about Twitter basically telling developers to not bother developing clients, I was really struck by their claim that 90% of Twitter users use official Twitter apps. Maybe my world is just a small part of the twitterverse overall, but I don’t know many people who don’t use a third-party app, especially tweetdeck.

So, today, when I saw GigaOm quoting a very different statistic, suddenly it made some sense. I use Tweetdeck for almost all of my twitter needs, except one. When I want to look at folks who have recently started following me, and decide if I want to follow any of them, I generally go to the website. So, am I one of the 90% of active users who use official Twitter properties? Yes, I am. Am I also part of the 42% of tweets that are generated by third-party apps? You bet!

My question for you is, does any of the official Twitter clients give me anywhere near the power that Tweetdeck does? Frankly, if Tweetdeck gets cut off, and I am unable to  replace the filtering, synching settings between my iPhone and my computers, columns, and multiple accounts in one client, I’m probably going to simply use Twitter less. At the very least, if I can’t use global filters, I’m highly likely to follow a lot fewer people, which would also mean me getting less use out of Twitter. Same can probably be said for not having multiple columns. It’s how I organize Twitter, without it, organization gets harder, and I’m less likely to get as much out of it.

Anyone been using the “official” apps want to weigh in and tell me more about the features? It would save me some time in testing them out for myself. Still, I’m hopeful that Twitter won’t actually kill off Tweetdeck, but I also know better than to not have a backup plan!