The theme is data organisation and navigation which has been focussed to digital media and so far has been limited to the online environment.

For the presentation today the media selected was images and portrayed as ‘the life of a photo’ and a side-by-side case study was conducted for Picasa, Flickr and Facebook with regard to uploading and editing.

Post-it notes show what features each site has so common themes could be established. This also allows for a contrast between them detailing the differences.

The feedback from the presentation suggested that the focus needed to be more broad and look at profiles of users of the systems such as a Flickr Pro user. This will refine what it is the project aims to look at.

The answer then is to profile a Flickr pro user and their ‘life of a photo’. What do they use Flickr? How do they use Flickr? This is the approach that needs to asserted before the project can enter fully into detailed analysis such as what was presented today.

I’ve noticed recently that Facebook is having a whole bunch of problems that are quite serious isues with regard to users.

These include:

• Photo tag requests are not displayed correctly – when you click to view the tag request it appears people have tagged the search button, go home and then click the request again and all is ok.
• Videos that are uploaded run far faster than they should but keep the audio running normally. Makes for some interesting viewing.
• People tag you in some photos or video and Facebook notifies you, you click to view the photo and it takes you to a random photo – it appears the album does not exist.

I think it is possible that Facebook has become too big, with so many people adding hundreds of pointless applications it seems likely that it has put unexpected stress on their services. Imaging how much storage and processing power they need when you consider how many photos you upload and how much you pay for that. Its free, exactly.

I read recently that Facebook was broke and running out of storage space so were approaching a series of venture capitalists for funding to buy more servers.

So could all this mean the end for Facebook? Only about a quarter of my friends lists actually update it now compared to pretty much all of them 6 months ago.

Google… are you interested? They are building their own social networking applcation to run on 3rd party websites as a means of seeing what your friends are up to and collaboratively reading web pages. I can’t remember off-hand what that was called or exactly what it does but I am keeping my ears close to the ground to find out more. Would Facebook be a nice addition to this? After all Google did buy YouTube, why not Facebook?

Well a Moroccan computer engineer certainly didn’t, although he did sign up to Facebook as Prince Moulay Rachid, younger brother of King Mohammed VI. I don’t think the guy was ever expecting to get caught and if he did I suppose he thought he would just get a slap on the wrist from Facebook and not be allowed to play with the other kids.

Far from it, this guy has been sentenced to 3 years in prison and ordered to pay $1,300. I think that’s a little extreme myself but hey, now I’m not going to sign up to Facebook pretending to be the queen as originally planned!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7258950.stm