Notes from SheTech

In the last week I have begun researching a topic for a new book with David Busch, along the lines of the last two, this time with a great and, to me, relevant spin: Flickr; specifically, how to promote your photography using Flickr.

These days, social media platforms are nearly as prolific as video games, and in the Game of Social Media, a few are inevitably rising to the top. Flickr and Facebook currently reign in their respective niches, even while users continue to spread their presence out among multiple platforms. As a result, and as the technology has made such a thing possible, users have demanded–and developers have responded with–ways to connect all these many media. Particularly because many of these platforms have evolved into very specialized sites, it is useful to be able to connect them in order to take advantage of one’s not-always-overlapping circle of contacts across the sites.

Flickr, which began life as a simple photo-sharing site, was taken over by Yahoo! along the way, bringing that company’s considerable resources to bear on what was already a rapidly growing medium (Yahoo definitely knew a good thing when they saw one!). Given that Yahoo is one of the highest ranking search engine platforms (second only to Google, at least at last check–I think Bing is giving everyone a run for their money, but Google still dominates that field), Flickr’s new gardener helped grow it to enormous proportions very quickly, and users were suddenly finding their images propagated all over the globe. With Yahoo’s enormous development team, Flickr quickly expanded to offer features and functions useful not only to amateur snapshot photographers interested in sharing photos with friends and family, but suddenly “prosumers” and professional photographers were finding a great new home for sharing, studying and promoting images as well.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s supremacy (now acknowledged by MySpace in recent news–MySpace is putting a positive spin on it, but they have definitely taken a step in a different direction) means that millions of users around the globe, in all walks of life, are connected through its good offices. And because it has worked very hard to make itself relevant for both personal and professional use, it seems natural for Flickr and Facebook to be friends… and so they are!

Both platforms offer methods whereby developers can contribute applications (“Apps”, in modern near-geekspeak), expanding them for all sorts of fun uses from idle games to click professional extensions, and several smart developers have created apps on both sides that connect the two. We’ll be exploring and writing about them in the upcoming book and sharing some of our findings here as well–not to mention installing the live applications ourselves to see how they work in real life!

Get connected, stay tuned!

Find SheTech on Facebook and Flickr, too!