> Facebook has become the primary place web users spend their time and create content, and is mostly closed to Google’s crawlers.
Seriously? I'm yet to see any of my facebook friends to create anything interesting that google can't crawl. Every single artistic person I know has a blog or a website. Maybe it's just my friends, but the most creative thing they do is post a link from reddit or some crappy photo from a party two weeks ago.
Facebook is such a horrible platform for creative people. Name any creative area and I will name you a website that beats facebook hands down (in both community and convenience of posting and reviewing your creations).
I think you're missing the point. Flickr has a grand total of somewhere over 5 billion photos. [1] Facebook adds four billion photos to its collection every month. [2]
I agree that many of the best photos will be reshared elsewhere, for now, but think ahead a little:
- Facebook could just improve their photo hosting just a bit -- or add a for-pay option to do so -- and then eliminate any other photo hosting site's reason for existing.
- If you think about all the photos ever taken, artistic photography has always been a tiny, tiny niche market. Photos have always been about remembering and sharing, not art. And this is true of Flickr just as much as Facebook. Nowadays this extends to recording our lives practically minute by minute. The metadata associated with this is invaluable -- yes, ad targeting is part of it, but the sheer documentary volume is also important for a search company like Google, even if we limit ourselves to what EXIF can tell us.
Flickr is also pretty horrible if you're into photography. There's no systematic way to find good photos (e.g. top average rating). Both Flickr and Facebook are huge garbage dumps of photos. Facebook has absolutely no way to find great photos. Flick has some very limited functionality for it, but it could've been so much better. Neither were build to suit artists. They were designed to be garbage dumps.
Actually, I'm an amateur photographer, and Flickr is pretty sweet for me.
First of all, they are doing rating, though it may not be obvious how -- which I think is better than some dumb rating widget that can be abused -- and if Facebook would be able to show you pictures by rating, all you'd ever see are pictures of teenage girls in tight miniskirts, which get dozens of times better ratings then the pictures uploaded by my artistic-friends ;)
Then, there is no cheaper alternative for keeping a backup in the cloud. A Pro account is $2 per month, with unlimited uploads. I know people that have over 50000 pictures uploaded using the original size (that's over 150 GB of data btw). And I actually wanted to upload my photos to S3 or to Google's Blogstore or to Dropbox, but it's gets much more expensive for such a volume (and currently I'm uploading 2 GB / month -- my baby boy is growing up :)).
Also, on Flickr you can access the EXIF headers of a picture -- and if you type your camera's model in their search box, you get thousands of photos for which you can access details like exposure, aperture and focal length, thus you can get better by examining the work of other people.
Also, it does feature a "share on facebook" button, with which you can publish a link + a thumbnail on Facebook.
Yes it sucks, but it is better than any alternative I ever tried. Pretty tired of hearing "if Facebook does this or that" too -- I'll be happy if they do, but they haven't and they aren't interested in art -- they are more interested in tight miniskirts of teenagers that get massive upvotes ;)
Also consider that this does MORE than what photo.net's form you gave me does -- as Flickr doesn't have a rigid taxonomy, but a user-defined and very dynamic folksonomy, and they do need to do a full-text search for this.
keep in mind that Flickr gets thousands times
more traffic and number of photos uploaded
Precisely -- Flickr cannot do dumb sorting based on metrics collected from a dumb rating widget so easily, because (a) they are bigger and (b) they have more noise, which follows from (a).
Ratings suck for differentiating items on a website. "5 stars" and "1 star" have some meaning, but everything else is worthless. For this and a few other good reasons, Flickr just collapses ratings into "favorites".
Flickr has an algorithm called "interestingness" which tries to guess which photos are worthwhile by looking at social activity and other such metrics. However, I agree that it isn't nearly good enough, if you are a real lover of photography. Flickr Explore tends to be filled with cliche photographic beauty. That said, if you expect a machine to tell you what good art is, you're going to wait a long time.
Facebook doesn't let you input enough information to do anything creative. I would never, ever write a blog post on my facebook, then link people to it.
Can you even do that?
I would never, ever post anything other than cellphone snapshots into facebook, their photo UI seems to discourage it as a photograph sharing tool (snapshot sharing yes, but I don't know anybody that would ditch flickr for facebook).
Can you upload music to facebook? I don't...think so?
People are creating things, but facebook has no way of categorizing this stuff, so I don't think people are putting "valuable" things into it, because they know that they'll never be able to find them again.
The fact that greplin is looked at as such an amazingly exciting tool illustrates this, I think.
Yeah you can write a "note". But it sucks, closed to people who don't have FB accounts, and, depending on your settings, possibly closed to people who aren't your friend.
Though, the "Notes" can also be a boon to certain people. EG: myself, I post certain notes for my friends in FB network, which is NOT public (people from work, business, etc.)
I also use it as a dump for future "working" blogs, getting feedback from people I actually know on FB. Their are positives to keeping this "Note" behind the "wall" of FB depending on your needs.
Specific example; I lost ~80 lbs in a year, and used to be a large muscular dude (so I've tweaked my diet pretty heavily throughout 7 or so years). I get random questions frequently from friends and instead of going through every iota of information, I throw it up in a Note.
I think the problem is deeper and more widespread. Facebook, and all of our conceptions of social networks, are inherently restrictive, reductive, and shallow in how they allow people to express themselves.
The underlying assumption is that users are lazy and want the simplest, easiest, least involved ways to communicate possible, but I think the provided tools at the very least contribute to this.
You are attacking a strawman, because you misunderstood what he wrote. He never said users create "creative" content, they just create content. And it's the most personal type of content, which may not be interesting to you but is essentially a taste and emotion graph of the world. That's probably the reason cdixon, co-founder of Hunch, considers it important.
Creative people are really using specific social platforms like Flickr and DeviantArt However Facebook really captures "casual creativity": Like a mom posting a photo of a child's drawing to share with grandma. This audience doesn't want Google to crawl that semi-personal content. As where a Flickr and DeviantArt user will pimp their creations to the masses.
He's not talking about creative people, he's talking about Normals. For most people a link from Reddit or a party photo is all the content creation they do.
Besides which, the aggregation and social filtering from what my friends' "like" or "retweet" is actually a great source for content.
> Facebook is such a horrible platform for creative people.
Just as an anecdote, I'll tell you what my creative wife did this weekend. She wrote 2 or 3 posts on her blog, and then she bugged me all day to tell her which one of them was any good, because she wanted to post the good ones on Facebook for all her friends to see. You could say "Hey, why don't the 200 friends she has follow her blog using Google Reader?", but that's not how things work in real, non-geeky life.
Seriously? I'm yet to see any of my facebook friends to create anything interesting that google can't crawl. Every single artistic person I know has a blog or a website. Maybe it's just my friends, but the most creative thing they do is post a link from reddit or some crappy photo from a party two weeks ago.
Facebook is such a horrible platform for creative people. Name any creative area and I will name you a website that beats facebook hands down (in both community and convenience of posting and reviewing your creations).