Five Reasons I Stopped Using Facebook
I have been getting into micro-blogging as a way to self promote and to share ideas. Twitter and Facebook status updates served me well over the past couple of years. When I don’t have time to write a long blog post, micro-blogging allows me to share links and observations easily. I started out using Facebook status updates, but recently I made the decision: I was going to stop using Facebook entirely and do all of my micro-blogging on Twitter.
I could go on and on about how much I’ve grown to distrust Facebook but even as I was writing out a long discussion about what I don’t like about it I got exhausted and bored, so here’s the top five reasons I stopped using Facebook:
1. Exposure
I use micro-blogging to help with promotion of my work. If people follow my tweets they are more likely to RSS my blog and to link back to my blog. Facebook, being a closed system means that I will only be talking to the people that I already know. Yes, I could have a public Facebook page, but it’s still in the clutches of the evil empire. The genius of Twitter is that it’s open and it’s everywhere.
2. Critique
As I mention in #1, the only people who read my stuff on Facebook are the people that I already know. This means when I post photographs, I get the wonderful and supportive comments from my friends and family. This is a great ego boost, but in reality sometimes you need strangers who have no vested interest in you personally to tell you that your photo sucks. I have lots of people to tell me what I’m doing right. To improve I need people to tell me what I’m doing wrong.
3. Tedious Friend Requests
One of the things that I can’t stand about Facebook is the ubiquitous Friend Request. Sure, it is neat to hear from a long lost friend or reconnect with someone who slipped off your radar. However, 90% of the friend requests that I get are either people I barely talked to in high school who friend me simply because they recognize my name on someone else’s list, or they are coworkers who think it’s necessary to friend me even though they see me every day. The former usually never even go beyond clicking the friend button, and the latter use Facebook to resend me the same email chain letters and internet hoaxes that they’ve polluted my email inbox with. When someone wants to follow me on Twitter, they don’t have to ask my permission.
4. The Illusion of Privacy
The reason that it’s ok that total strangers follow me on Twitter is because I’m not posting anything on Twitter that I want to keep private. As a culture, I think most people who Twitter understand that. Facebook users do not. I am constantly amazed at what people post on Facebook. Do you have an intimate knowledge of all 459 of the people on your friend list? Do you trust their internet security practices? Are any of your friends likely to say something you don’t want your other friends, family, or coworkers to read?
Facebook recently changed their privacy policies from private by default, to public by default. Gawker has the full run-down.
5. Facebook sucks
Need more proof? Take a look at this growing list of issues that have surfaced over the last few years about Facebook.
I’m not starting some big, anti-Facebook campaign. I haven’t deactivated my Facebook account. Not that it would matter if I did, because the Facebook user agreements mean that they own my data and can keep it forever. I am no longer updating my account though. I just don’t feel comfortable using it anymore.
I think that Twitter is a better way to go.
Let the millions pour in…or something
Last September I opened an account with Photoshelter with the idea of applying to have my work sold as part of their collection. Photoshelter is one of the stock companies that has shrugged off the exploitative practices of the mega-stock companies like Corbis and (shiver) Getty. The big companies have a pretty standard 30/70 split, with the photographer getting the 30. Additionally, they control the pricing of the images, so the photographer generally can’t even control that much. Photoshelter has a different policy: that 30/70 split is reversed – the photographer gets 70% of all sales:
You keep 70% of your transaction proceeds.
No fancy accounting, no co-brokered transactions to water down your earnings.
Total transparency of transactions.
You price your rights-managed and royalty-free images at market rates.
You keyword your own images against our controlled vocabulary.
Our search results provide the fairest ranking algorithms to maximize visibility and revenues for all of our photographers.
You do not need to compete with wholly owned content.
Get valuable feedback on your work from our team of editors with every image you submit.
Anyways, it seems like a great idea and has gotten great feedback from the community. So anyways, I started the application to be part of the collection last September, but didn’t get around to completing it until earlier this week. And I’m happy to announce that the editors at Photoshelter have approved my application and my work is now a tiny part of the collection. I submitted several still-life images with my application, which were all accepted and classified as Pro-Stock (which basically means traditional stock rather than the funky, “contemporary stock” classification). I am hoping to start building out my collection, but seeing as most of my work is work-for-hire these days at my day job, it’s going to be a while before I have a big collection up there.
But it’s nice to finally have made the step and now have a place to actually make a few dollars on my images. Here is the link to my collection on Photoshelter. I’m not expecting to make millions, especially not on the six images I have up there now, but shooting with the idea of stock in mind is a great way for me to potentially get paid for personal projects.
Now if only I understood the stock business enough to shoot exactly those images that buyers are looking for…oh wait, Photoshelter helps me there too with their School of Stock, complete with shot lists. Sweet.
Wedding Photographer's Nightmare
“A dispute over a missing camera at a wedding reception escalated into a 100-person brawl that left two people with stab wounds Saturday night, police said.”
Creative Commons
I’ve been a supporter of Creative Commons since I started blogging way back in 2003. Now that I am making photographs for a living, I’m spending a lot more time thinking about the implications of Creative Commons, and how that affects my career as a photographer. Dan Heller has a great written a great article called Creative Commons and Photography. His take? Creative Commons, while good for some media and implementations, is no good for photography.
Photographs only take 1/250 of a second to make, and they can be made available online instantly. There are billions upon billions of them online, with millions being added daily. Monitoring and enforcement of CC licensing for photos is unrealistic, unmanageable, and highly prone to both non-compliance by licensees, and to fraudulent attributions by others. This, in turn, degrades the integrity and reliability of the CC system, thereby compromising confidence in it.
I would like to note that even though the actual act of pressing the shutter takes as little as 1/250 of a second, the act of making a professional photograph can take much longer (although many great photos were made just that quickly). His points are valid though, and I like his take on the “confidence” of creative commons, and how adding creative commons licenses to photography is not only bad for photographers who make a living from selling the usage rights to photos, but also to Creative Commons itself. It’s an interesting read.