Life, Liberty and Photo-Sharing for All

28 July 2007 Ken Yeung View Comments

So I recently signed up for Facebook and indeed realize that it is fully all that and a bag of chips…well just because while they’re pretty equally matched, there are some subtle differences. First of all, Myspace will allow you to completely customize your profile page and allow amateur web designers to butcher their pages with bright green background and ugly yellow font color in small Times New Roman fonts. That’s how much liberty the Myspacers have…BUT, in Facebook, you lack this ability, but in return you have the greater opportunity to use several “open source” applications that are built specifically to integrate with the social networking site.

There are applications built by other folks that allow you to do multiple things such as jot down where you’ve been in the world, ask various questions for your “friends”, and even one of the most remarkable things, allow you to share your Flickr pictures on your profile page. Wait, did I read that right?

Yes, that’s right…even though Facebook has not yet been bought by Yahoo, someone has found a way to integrate their Flickr accounts with Facebook. It’s a remarkable thing. I’m sure that you could possibly do that for Myspace, but unfortunately as of now, Fox is only allowing Photobucket (owned by Fox) to be integrated into profile pages.

All I want is a photo sharing module that we can integrate with our various pages. Sure, Flickr (which is probably the most popular photo-sharing site out there – although I don’t have any statistics to back that up) has the ability to link your images with your blogs, but what if I want to feature them and instead of setting up various photo sharing accounts and/or uploading them to multiple sites, I just want ONE place as the source. Is this too much to ask? I know it’s all about proprietary, but c’mon…wouldn’t the end user be that much happier to have one place to link their photos from?