I had a really fun time yesterday down at Slutwalk Seattle 2012. I am also very glad that I had my press cred’s as an e-mail as I got asked at least four times about why I am here and what am I doing before we even made it to Westlake for the rally. Apparently if I heard it right they had to eject people for voyeurism, so I can understand the stress. There were about seven photographers I saw really covering the event. And the awesome intern from the stranger, I hope we see each other at another event, you were getting some awesome pictures.

One of the things that surprised me though were the number of men. I simply do not equate men as victims of rape, that is always something that will open my eyes. What you can’t imagine, can sometimes happen with negative consequences for the inability to imagine it.

I think this year was huge, with all the issues about denigrating women, women judges in Arizona saying you get what you deserve even if it is an off duty security/patrol person who felt you up. If you hadn’t been in the bar, then it wouldn’t have happened to you.

You can snag the pictures over on Flickr, with all the controversy over smugmug in the last couple of days, I’ll be using Flickr until I can figure out what I want to do with them. While Zenfolio looks good, you never know. In the mean time, enjoy the show, it was a very cool place to go visit. And I have to admit, it was a really fun photo shoot.

I will so need to find a good plugin for WordPress that allows connectivity back to Flickr Galleries, sorry about not being able to include them in here.

Related articles

• Mark Your Calendars for Slutwalk 2012
• The time has come for another SlutWalk
• 10 Reasons Why You Should Attend Slutwalk Johannesburg
• SlutWalk Melbourne – Interview
• SlutWalk 2012

Image via CrunchBase

I have been working on some alternatives to Smugmug over the last 24 hours since I finally bit the bullet and decided that it is time to go, as I explained here yesterday. What I am seeing is that the sites are basically breaking down into two categories, showcase and warehouse. While my experience doesn’t really mean anything, it is interesting to see how picture storage has changed over the years. I started with Smugmug, I stayed with Smugmug, and now that I am looking for those specific things I am looking for, it is interesting to see how other sites have taken on the industry.

Alternatives seem to break down into two categories, Warehouses like Flickr or Zenfolio, or showcase sites like 500PX or Deviant Art. The big difference seems to be in bulk upload, tagging and management of the pictures on the site you are using. So I will break the down by what I have discovered, if you want to share your opinion by all means feel free to comment.

Please remember the reason for why I post pictures on line, it is to get feedback, meet new people, see what others have done that might be useful to helping me grow as a photographer.

Warehouse Sites

Flickr and Zenfolio both seem to behave much like Smugmug does with bulk uploads, bulk editing of tags, names, alt tags, and other ways to help a search engine find your pictures. I like the bulk editing that I have not been able to find or use on Smugmug even if they had it.

Flickr and Zenfolio also have some very nice sharing options that Smugmug is missing. Both will share to Pinterest, Zenfolio shares to G+ (which has rapidly become another home to showcasing pictures, there are a lot of very active very wonderful photographers on G+), all will share to Facebook and twitter. Smugmug only shares to Facebook and Twitter bypassing two very hot ways of sharing pictures. Flickr and Zenfolio will do individual sharing or total gallery sharing. These options are extraordinarily important to me to have.

Custom Price Lists – Flickr does not seem to do this in any other way that through Getty Images, so they are missing an important revenue stream. With the new CEO, maybe we will get lucky and get some commerce going on Flickr that bypasses Getty which is in a totally different orbit for most photographers on the planet. Few if any have the name or reputation for being part of Getty. Zenfolio much like Smugmug allows for custom price lists and markups. It also has a deeper product base than Smugmug does, you can put your pictures on everything from Kitchen Aprons to single prints. Zenfolio has a much richer and deeper product line that will add a differing product base for photographers.

Setup and Use, both Flickr and Zenfolio are stupid simple to set up. Much like your camera, your web site is a tool you should know intimately. If you need customer support for simple functions, like it sounds like Smugmug is providing a lot of tier one “how do I upload a picture” support that is bleeding them dry, go with Flickr and/or Zenfolio.

Zenfolio has some options that are found nowhere else in terms of bulk warehousing. The blog feature is critical if you want to have good hits from a search engine. You can discuss a picture (remember search engines need words to properly categorize what your picture is about along with the Alt Tags) in the blog, link to it, and get more search engine goodness by being a prolific or good blogger. Maybe a picture a day with descriptors of what that picture is about. I can live without Zenfolio’s guest book, but some might like that functionality.

I am finding that the audiences are different on each site; to appeal to different audiences you want to be represented across as many sites as you can afford. Flickr comes in at 30 bucks a year for all you can eat, while Zenfolio comes in at a price point of 120 dollars a year for what I need. Your needs might vary, but that is a heck of a lot less for all you can eat Zenfolio than the 300 dollar Smugmug. The ability to truly tag, alt tag, and describe your pictures is something that search engines need. I find that when I tag pictures adequately I usually end up on the first page of Google Image Search rapidly. Both Flickr and Zenfolio seem to be deeply integrated with Google Images, which is a primary way that people find pictures. Smugmug not so much, usually my Smugmug pictures end up beyond page 10 in an image search for an event in favor of Flickr people.

Showcase Sites

Showcase sites like 500PX and Deviant Art really have few if any true bulk (and by bulk I am talking hundreds of pictures at a shot) upload, editing, tagging, or other functions that are not extraordinarily painful to use. Showcase sites are really about showing off your best work, or the work you love the best, then pointing those users to your bigger galleries on the bulk warehouse sites. DA, Imagur, 500PX, and other sites like that are really geared around one picture, one upload, heavy on the descriptors so that search engines can find it.

I have been a member of DA for two years now, and find it very easy and wonderful to use with a beautiful community. I barely use Imagur because it is mobile only, and while I do a lot of mobile work, it is such a pain in the ass to upload to Imagur then to Facebook then to G+ that the steps are too many for me to take. I also hate working on the mobile screen unless it is an Ipad or bigger. 500PX has turned into an interesting experience, and one that I am starting to like. I treat 500PX like a showcase site (which is not necessarily true with DA), and I do compare my pictures with others on 500PX.

500PX feels snooty cow, I am a “professional photographer” go away your bugging me kid, but if you aspire to be an excellent photographer, learning from professionals and their work is a great way of approaching the problem. It is worth uploading only the very super best of your stuff to 500PX and see if anyone notices. I have only six likes on 500PX, but those are real likes from real photographers, they mean more than 100 likes over on DA or on Flickr. That means I appealed to a real photographer that is super important if you want to grow in your art. You did something right, and a snooty cow photographer stopped long enough to like your work.

The breakdown then is going to be for my alternatives, Flickr and Zenfolio for bulk warehousing needs, DA and 500PX along with G+ and Facebook for sharing the pictures I truly love. Then point people off to my bulk sites so that consumers can see the whole nine yards when it comes to pictures.

Remember that Upload Junction can move your pictures from point A to point B, but it might not be 100 correct in the move. If you are moving I would recommend downloading all your pictures from Smugmug (or indeed any site when you are considering a move), then using an automated tool like Upload Junction to see what crosses over and what does not. All this depends on your gallery settings (private/public), password protection, watermarking, and other issues that go along with being a photographer.

Let me know what you think.

Related articles

• Why I am leaving Smugmug Hint it is not just about the money
• Zenfolio and ShootDotEdit Partner up to Save Photographers Time
• PhotographyTalk.com and Zenfolio Strategic Partnership Provides Zenfolio Clients with Expanded Benefits
• SmugMug: Bad Timing on a Price Increase and a Social Media Crisis Unfolds #smugmugged
• Flickr, Smugmug or a WordPress plug-in? Snowflake details within.

Image via CrunchBase

About seven years ago, a friend of mine who was helping me get into photography recommended that I check out Smugmug, and a wonderful relationship was born. I love, have loved, and will appreciate Smugmug even as I am walking away from the web site. Over the last three years I have shoved some 853,000 picture views down the wire, and uploaded some 123 gig’s worth of pictures over the lifetime of my account. I am not a big picture viewer, photography is something I do for fun, and I don’t plan on or intend to make money off my picture taking. I like to share, I love comments, I love feedback, I want to see how other people see what I see in a picture. Smugmug has been ok for that, but there are better sites for what I need out of picture taking.

I am probably an average Smugmug customer. Little guy, maybe 30,000 pictures in total on the site, but have seen the majority of my growth in visitors and picture views in the last year as I took 15,000 of those pictures in the last year. I had an exceptional chance to really get into a number of events this year to cover, and got a trip to china to boot. Those are all going to generate a lot of pictures. I got a new camera and saw my average picture size go from 3 Megs to 6 Megs, but also saw a lot better quality in the pictures along the way.

I currently pay 100 dollars a year, less than 10 bucks a month for storage of my pictures. Everything I have on Smugmug is deeply embedded in blogs, reports, web sites, and other places where I use my own pictures, or others have picked them up for their own sites.

There are some things I don’t get on Smugmug though that I do get on Flickr and on Deviant Art (DA), which are increasingly critical for me to have. The lack of these services on Smugmug is the reason I opened up a Flickr and DA account to begin with.

I rely on feedback; I want to see what others think of the picture, good, bad, ugly. I live for comments, thoughts, likes, hearts, fave’s or whatever else a person looking at my picture is thinking at the time. I have had in the seven years at Smugmug 23 messages from customers, few if any fave’s hearts or tweets that I didn’t originate. But looking over at the year I have been at Flickr I have 98 comments, 1583 favorites, and 684,000 picture views in that time. One year at Flickr and I am almost at Smugmug levels of picture viewing. Deviant art is a similar story, but only 81,000 picture views, but hundreds of fave’s, likes, comments, and opinions from other photographers. All this in one year, which I have to go back three years to match out on Smugmug, but let’s look at apples to apples here, one year on each site.

Smugmug Number of Views 618,000, no likes, no fave’s, no comments, one sale for six bucks

Flickr Number of Views 644,000, 1,508 likes, 99 comments, no sales

Deviant Art Number of Views 82,000, 1,100 likes, 498 comments, no sales

What is important to me is the number of views, the response from the peanut gallery, the people who are excited that they saw a picture of themselves at a show, could share it with their friends seamlessly, and otherwise is what is important to me. Obviously sales are not a primary consideration for me, I don’t even bother to water mark them, and I have some odd ideas about copyright when it comes to “my work”. See “my work” is a hobby, mostly convention pictures, event pictures, but when KIRO, KUMO, OWS, Der Spiegel, and others want to use my work, they give me plenty of credit if no money. I am good with that, photography is how I blow off steam, it is my release, and it is my entertainment.

Smugmug just does not draw the consumer or picture viewer expressions that I need to have to see if I am taking good pictures. I thank those professionals on the other sites who give me awesome feedback, and I love the comments from the peanut gallery even when they make me wonder why I am alive.

So from the interactivity viewpoint, Smugmug simply is not worth 300 dollars a year, not when Flickr is 30, and DA is 20.

Then there is the little niggling thing about Nudity, see I got busted for that this year as well. If you troll Smugmug looking for “fine art nude” you will see tons of naked people. It is awesome if you are a fine art nude photographer. But god forbid you post someone with body paint. At the Freemont summer solstice parade the reason to go is for the body paint as a photographer. The Terms of Service at Smugmug clearly state no nudity, but if a customer of Smugmug complains about nudity on your web site (regardless of how many other nude pictures there are on the site), Smugmug will drop you a nice letter after they have locked off the gallery. I ran into that and discussed it earlier on this blog. Once we were over that hurdle, Flickr and DA both have “age gates” that allow you to mark nude or not safe for work or restricted. Heck almost every other web site that does photography has an age gate of some sort including 500PX, so seriously, really? No age gate Smugmug? Unevenly applied rules for nudity, when mine were body paint but you can see a lot more detail on other sites within Smugmug?

So from the nudity viewpoint, not having an age gate and a Terms of Service that would make a puritan proud, Smugmug is simply not worth the 300 dollars a year, not when Flickr is 30, and DA is 20, and both come with age gates on some of my more racy and popular photographs.

Legendary customer support, I don’t use it, don’t really need it, I am computer and technology literate enough not to have to call customer support every time I have a blown upload or something else goes wrong because I got sent a reset packet from Smugmug. I know how to use a computer, so the legendary customer support I use is only when Smugmug contacts me because someone whined about a picture I am hosting there that offended someone because they were too tender of opinion or mind to see a person coated in body paint.

So from a Customer Support viewpoint, I don’t use it unless Smugmug contacts me. Smugmug is simply not worth the 300 dollars a year, not when Flickr is 30, and DA is 20, and I don’t use their customer support either because I know how to use a computer and upload a picture, as well as share it across multiple blogs and other web sites.

The raise from 100 dollars to 300 dollars a year for me is really just the final nail in a coffin of more and more problems with simple things at Smugmug. From what I have been reading on multiple blogs and forums, it looks like the average person exodus is well underway, and the price raise even has its own twitter hashtag #smugmugged to go along with that. While some writers have compared this to the Netflix fiasco which Thomas Hawk has eloquently debated and refuted on his web site. But the real issue remains to be seen, from what I am reading the exodus is well under way which will leave Smugmug exactly the same as before, a series of silos rather than a way to truly share pictures and gather consumer feedback.

Regardless of why you take pictures, if you can absorb into your business model the price increase from 100 to 300 (for me) then good to go, this is a business issue. If you are a middle of the road or smaller photographer that price increase might not be absorb able when there are cheaper equally as brilliant systems as Smugmug provides. It depends on why you take pictures and what your expectations of those pictures are. Mine is consumer feedback, these are not customers, these are not people I am trying to make money off of, my people, my tribe, are people I want to share with, Smugmug has always had a hard time building community, Flickr and DA are communities from the outset. Since I am more interested in community than sales, I’ll be leaving Smugmug. As I stated on G+ yesterday, and on Thomas Hawks’ web site, it is like pulling the plug on grandma, it is cutting off my arm, I’ll miss Smugmug because they have been very good to me for seven years. But I no longer get what I really want from the web site, and I do get it somewhere else, the price increase was just a motivating factor, but one that is apparently motivating a lot of people to move away from Smugmug.

Related articles

• SmugMug Announces new Pro Subscription Accounts
• Subscriptions set to soar at SmugMug
• SmugMug: Bad Timing on a Price Increase and a Social Media Crisis Unfolds #smugmugged
• SmugMug’s Pro Pricing Change Sucks
• Photographers how much do your picture views matter

2012 has been a phenomenal six months of some of the most intense picture viewing on my Smugmug, Flickr and Deviant Art accounts I have ever recorded. In 2011, I had around 64,000 picture views for the year and thought that was awesome, this year so far in the first six months I have had some 671,000 picture views. It is possible given the shoots I know I have upcoming for the rest of the year that I might actually reach a million picture views this year.

The sad part is sales, I have sold exactly 3 pictures, these are my first ever sales. At that rate to make a living off this I’ll need 100’s of millions of picture views a year to make any kind of livable money off photography.

My work has been seen on KUOW and on KIRO TV’s Seattle Insider, some of my Occupy Wall Street pictures were picked up in Germany as part of an international journalist’s pool, and I have had lots of people ask me for permission to use my pictures as an avatar or for some other personal use, and I am good with this.

So the question is, with all these amazing picture views, and amazing feedback, and the hundreds of downloads of the pictures, how do picture views equate to dollars.

In my experience they don’t.

So how does anyone make money off of photography?

Hopefully someone will let me know, because what is on the net right now is pretty lame, I do not have the ability to frame and hang out at small local fairs, and I don’t take landscape pictures, I do Cosplay, punk rock shows, and parades with people in various states of dress and exhibitionism. I am not all that interested in doing landscapes or other nature oriented make you feel good pictures. I do graffiti, and subcultures, riots and protests. Let the world know what your tricks are for non-landscape photographers to make a couple of coins by answering here, I’ll be interested in what you have to say, and I’ll roll up the comments later and give you full credit.

Related articles

• Arbitrary censorship and unevenly applied rules at Facebook and Smugmug(techwag.com)

  ---

• Take an unflattering picture prepare to get sued(techwag.com)

  ---

DSC_0004 (Photo credit: Dan Morrill)

This is an interesting turn of events in terms of what it could be like to be a photographer in the near future. There is already enough problems over being a photographer and trying to take pictures of the police, or other government servants in action, but now Techdirt is reporting that a blogger took and posted on her web site of Raanan Katz, a co-owner of a sports team and a billionaire. The good part is that she seems to be well defended by her lawyers right now; the bad part is that Katz has also taken on Google to have the picture removed.

As a photographer I do take pictures, sometimes thousands of them, and when I am culling them I am really looking at more like eyes closed, is it in focus, are the colors right, do I like it. These judgments are made on the fly, usually with only a few seconds to make the opinion, delete it or keep it and move on. There has been the occasional non-flattering picture that makes it into my photo streams on Smugmug and Flickr, generally if someone complains I’ll take a look at it again, and then decide if there is enough artistic merit to keep it. I do get the occasional complaint, generally I have many other pictures so I don’t sweat it and will generally take it down, sometimes I think I really like it, it tells its own story, and I’ll keep it. But no one in my knowledge has ever been successfully sued for showing an unflattering picture of someone.

If that was the case then TMZ, most grocery store news rags, and some fashion magazines are in for a hard time. They make money off of unflattering pictures of celebrities. If it was not for the occasional unflattering pictures of people who are in the public eye, so many businesses would be out of business. All someone would have to do if Katz wins this one is say it was unflattering, and have it yanked. While right now Katz seems to be undergoing the Streisand effect with the lawsuit, photographers have to think about all the pictures they take of people, and the subsequent mayhem that would happen if everyone hated their picture and wanted it taken down. People pictures, street photography, candid’s, a lot of photography would be under the gun, and seriously in jeopardy.

It is good that Katz is suing Google along with this; Google has some awesome lawyers that will help the blogger win her case. But on the odd chance that Katz prevails, people who take pictures of people are in for a very rough ride in the future.

Related articles

• Google sued for not removing ugly photo of Miami Heat owner(news.cnet.com)

  ---

Image via CrunchBase

Over the last couple of days I have seen content removed from Facebook and my account locked out for a bit, including everything tied into Facebook. And I have also been working with Smugmug because while nudity is not allowed apparently someone decided to complain that there was nudity in my galleries on Smugmug. Not that there are not multiple gigabytes of fine art nudes, nudes, sex, BDSM, and other stuff on Smugmug to go along with that.

The problem all centers on pictures I took at the Freemont Summer Solstice Parade, an amazing parade that has quite the history of expression, art, fantasy, and weirdness. The Freemont Summer Solstice Parade is a Seattle institution and as such deserves not only the coverage I gave it, but the coverage of the many respectable newspapers, TV like KING and KIRO here in Seattle. The pictures I took are like the millions of other pictures taken at the event, there is body paint, there are parade floats, and there are people of all ages, walks of life, sexual orientation, and in various states of exhibitionism.

The parade has 100’s of thousands of people flooding into the Freemont area for a weekend of fun, sun, weirdness, arts, and simply having a good time.

At one point during the week I posted a picture of two people dancing in the street that was subsequently pulled by Facebook without any kind of reason why other than violating their terms of service. I am not the only photographer out there that has had this happen to them, including one award winning internationally recognized photographer from France, and he has coverage of his travails over on the Huffington post.

Real women and men are anatomically correct, just a thought here that makes sense, most of us want our partners and friends to be anatomically correct. The only thing I can assume out of Facebook is that if you blow up the picture to 300% you can just make out a nipple on one of the people in the background. It is not a center focus of the picture, it is an accidental nipple, one that I would not have noticed and didn’t note when I posted it to Facebook.

Then there is Smugmug, as much as I love Smugmug (and will continue to be a paying customer, and have been a paying customer since 2005), I got a nice notice from their help desk heroes that someone had complained that there was nudity in one of my Galleries. Nudity is not officially allowed on Smugmug, but if you do a search for Fine Art Nudes, or even just Nude, thousands of pictures are there in public smugmug search. If the rule is “no nudity” then it must be applied evenly, not just when someone complains about nudity. Or Smugmug needs to age gate things like you can on Flickr and Deviant Art. We can’t have it both ways, either it is or it is not, and if not those rules need to apply evenly across the entire breadth of users of the site.

And that whole thing brings me to the idea of Arbitrary.

Nothing upsets people more than a rule that applies to them, but to no one else. That is singling out a person for special treatment, and that isn’t necessarily fair. We want to be treated fairly, even though we know that is something that happens infrequently. If we think we are not being treated fairly, we tend to get a bit upset about things.

With Facebook I didn’t know what the issue was other than violating their terms of service for a 3 pixel nipple that was out of focus, and embedded deeply into the background of the picture. The only reason I can come to this conclusion is because I learned about the award winning French photographer and his issues with women’s nipples. Remember, real women and men are anatomically correct, and a 3 pixel nipple really should not set off the morality monitors anywhere. Especially if it is not the focus of the image, deeply embedded in the background of the image, and for all intents and purposes an “accidental nipple”.

One has to wonder what prurient person focused on a 3 pixel nipple embedded in the background of a picture.

When Facebook logged me out everywhere, including social networks like Klout, Kred, Empire Avenue, and Facebook feeds into other systems, the amount of hysteria caused by automated connections, and the Facebook SSO sign on multiple sites failed, suddenly I am locked out of Pinterest, news sites, and other sites where my login is my Facebook login.

That single point of failure should give anyone pause for thought, if my Facebook account is canceled, then so does all the web sites that is tied to my Facebook account for logins also fail. That is a huge liability that an act of arbitrary censorship for a nipple that you have to blow the picture up 3X its normal size to even see gives me pause. It also means that I can no longer trust Facebook SSO at all, because of the arbitrary nature of the way that Facebook handled the image, and the subsequent fall out from that lockout and affirmation of their Terms of Service.

The actions of Facebook were not just arbitrary, but I am still guessing in the dark, I do not have any correspondence with Facebook that would explain exactly what went wrong. I truly do not care how it was reported, or who reported it if anyone. Without a clear knowledge of what TOS I violated, we are left guessing and spending about an hour to reauthorize the applications that I need to maintain a steady state social presence. Without knowing what happened, what rule I violated, Facebook comes off as capricious and arbitrary. As a walled garden of content, having them behave in arbitrary and capricious ways makes me nervous, makes them untrustworthy, and worries me with Facebook SSO, and the sites and accounts that rely on Facebook single signon.

Then we move over to Smugmug, they have been much cooler about things and explained that they had received multiple complaints that there was nudity in my galleries, and that this violated a specific section of their Terms of Service, especially Smugmug officially does not permit nudity on their site. That is good, they told me what the issue was then helped me set up the Galleries so that people I wanted to get to them could, but was invisible to Smugmug and Smugmug search.

The problem is that Smugmug much like Flickr is a cesspool of publicly searchable nudity, porn, BDSM, and Fine Art Nudes.

Applying the rule to one because of a complaint from someone else without evenly applying that rule to everyone is also arbitrary and capricious. It singles out one person for a violation of the TOS, without applying it equally and fairly across the entire infrastructure. There is nothing worse than being singled out for doing something, when thousands of Smugmug users are also violating that same rule. While I do not fault Smugmug for helping me set up the galleries correctly as far as they were concerned, what I do worry about is that the focus on one, rather than all. To be taken credibly they must apply TOS rules evenly, fairly, and to all users. It would be far easier to change their TOS to include nudity and implement an age gate like Flickr does than go after the hundreds of thousands of nude anatomically correct men and women pictures on the site.

The dependencies that we have with systems, I rely on Smugmug daily to deliver up to 10,000 images a day, I rely on Facebook to provide login information to most sites that are set up to use my Facebook login everywhere, simply worries me.

That means I change my behavior, and can no longer believe that Facebook SSO is safe for me to use because lord knows when I will post a picture with a 3 pixel nipple in it without even noticing that. Or simply stop using Facebook for pictures, and use G+ which has a robust art and picture community that does not seem to mind a 3 pixel nipple (I loaded pictures on both sites). Smugmug on the other hand has disappointed me by not applying a rule evenly and fairly. While I love their help desk heroes for helping me out, I have the feeling that I will need to retain those conversations with Smugmug support for the rest of my time on that site that shows I made best effort if they shut me down later on. It also means I keep a local copy of all my pictures, and rely on Flickr more as a backup in case Smugmug goes and kills the account because I forgot to set the gallery correctly.

I don’t mind censorship, we all know that we need to censor our speech and not yell fire in a crowded theater. We accept that as a society that there are limits to what we can say and what we do. What I resent is that capricious and arbitrary censorship on Facebook is alive and well not just for me, but for many people, and that rules are applied unevenly at Smugmug.

We all want to think that those systems we interact with will be fair, but when they become arbitrary and capricious with the follow on effects in the case of Facebook’s single sign on, they become a decided liability, and one where we must make back up plans, make sure things are not so tied to each other that the failure of one system cuts us off out of multiple systems, or otherwise impacts our ability to share, connect, and enjoy two people dancing in the street.

This has been a very interesting week for employers and Facebook. I have been writing about this story over on Toolbox, here and here if you are interested in reading,

Image via CrunchBase

but on this site I want to go a little deeper into the idea of asking prospective employees for a username and password to any social site because there is an additional complication, Google Plus. Then there is another issue with all this, federated identity, Single Sign On, using your Facebook and Google credentials to log into other sites.

While I have a question about this out to my friends who work at Google Plus, it is unlikely that I will get an official statement soon as this would be more of a corporate governance policy statement that would have to be made by the company. That means it would have to be official, so this will be a while in showing up in the news.

While it is admirable that Facebook is saying that sharing your password with anyone is a violation of their Terms of Service/Rights and Responsibilities, as well as opening up a kettle of worms that Employers might not be all that comfortable with or know how to handle, the entire social landscape of systems, Twitter, Facebook, G+, and for those who are persisting on dead systems like MySpace, Beebo, Friendster and Orkut also need to think about this one. We use our logins to access many sites, if your employer has the password and user name, they can go anywhere you have set up a federated identity, or make new accounts on questionable sites in your name. That is a lot of power, the power to impersonate a person with valid credentials.

Tell me how this is any different from identity theft at job point. The loaded gun pointed to your head is “just how bad do you want to be hired”, if you really want to be hired you will turn over your entire online life to us.

While the obvious applies here, you should not post anything anywhere that you need to keep private. That is what good old phone calls are for. That is just a good rule of thumb, anything social is like standing on a street corner with a huge sign that says “get it here”. People are going to see it, share it, talk about it, and if it even remotely looks bad for you from an employer perspective you pretty much so have to suck this one up. This is why I highly recommend scrubbing your online profiles when you have done stupid stuff, because we all do stupid things in life along the way.

Of course this argument does not end with Facebook; really this is the visible portion of the iceberg. Twitter I have a personal account and a company account, which one do I want to share? Which one portrays me in the best light; both accounts have questionable content depending on your frame of mind. My idea of normal might not be my employers’ idea of normal.

If I had to turn over my Google Plus account, well that is a federated system giving them access to my private YouTube videos, my e-mail, my Google docs including what my friends have shared with me, and some of it is questionable content. This includes all my Google apps, and everything else that I use on Google and how they all interlink via the federated identity system.

And that is just another point in this conversation, how many of us use our Facebook credentials to log into web sites? I do, on 9Gag and tons of others, including my SmugMug account. I have private galleries on SmugMug that are not for public consumption because I am also a professional photographer and do this at times for some seriously awesome dollars. Do I really want people to get a deep dive into my personal sense of humor if they go visit 9Gag? What about Hootsuite, Klout, Pinterest, and other sites I use with my Facebook login? How much does an employer really want to know about me right now?

Federated identity just adds to the complexity, once they have the username and password, your world is theirs, they can be you. How much do you trust the other person driving the keyboard and working in your name? If you are a control freak this will drive you absolutely insane in three seconds or less.

What about Porn Sites? They also allow Facebook connect.

What about everything that is interconnected through your history files? Really could be bad and really could be interesting, and really could be damaging when we find out exactly what kind of perverts we can all be, while we try to make our public images as fine upstanding pillars of the community. The kettle of worms is now open, and this is where this gets interesting. Federated identity makes for an interesting day, which is why I am personally glad to see Facebook taking a stand on this one.

Waiting to see what Google comes up with as a response. I really want this to go to trial too, we might just need to decide this one in the courts.

Mining social networking sites for some downright interesting pictures of

Image via CrunchBase

people doing things could not be easier. The bad part is that it is very easy to do, the good part is that adding pictures to your privacy settings is going to be something you want to do.

There are basically five web sites that are worth going after from the social media picture sharing viewpoint.

Facebook

Myspace

YFrog

Deviant Art

Twitpic

And as a bonus one – Smugmug although it is not the best if photographers do not tag their pictures, or give unique names to their pictures.

The Google search is very easy, starting in Google Images, (if you are doing this from work, make sure that safe browsing is on because some of this is not going to be safe for work).

Site:facebook dsc_* will bring up every picture that starts off with DSC a common naming convention across many digital pictures.

Changing the site:facebook.com to yfrog.com or twitpic.com just opens up the possibilities of combing through the entire social media sphere of pictures for interesting if not compromising pictures of people.

Data can be reached as far back as 800 days, for long term data twitpic is best, which often leads to someone’s Facebook or MySpace account, where pictures are usually not protected under privacy flags. They are easy to comb and see what is seeable.

Some of the more interesting variations on the theme are

Drunk

Passed out

Wasted

Party

Use the Urban Dictionary if you are not familiar with popular slang or the popular name for various situations that people find themselves in.

Overall though if there is an ability to put a privacy setting on people’s pictures, then you should do so. Some of the pictures I saw today were uniquely interesting as I worked this process out so that it would be viable.

Google hacking images can be a very interesting way of looking at random people across the social networking sphere.

Related articles

• Google’s image problem with Google+ (9to5google.com)
• Facebook, Google and YouTube gain the most from Pinterest’s traffic explosion (thenextweb.com)