Has social networking killed the family website?
How do you share your family photos with the world? Adam Turner wonders if there's any point in maintaining a family website when his friends are embracing Facebook.
Option 1: The family website/blog
For the last six or seven years I've maintained a family website in one form or another, with photos and the occasional status update. It was sort of a blog before blogging really took off although, like most blogs, it didn't get updated very often and wasn't very interesting to those outside my circle of friends.
I put a lot of work into the family website, including a few hand-coded resigns. After a major overhaul, such as the arrival of a new baby, I'd send out a group email to alert my friends to the changes. It was all very Web 1.0.
I improved the photo galleries over time and even dropped in a third-party gallery package, but I eventually came to terms with the fact that few people were bothering to look at the site other than when I sent a group email.
For the last few years I've toyed with the idea of turning it into a proper blog, making it easy to post updates and then alert people of new content via RSS. The arrival of more children put a serious dint in my spare time and it never happened.
I recently bought my wife an Eee PC, the household's first computer that's hers rather than mine/ours. Her computer should always work because, unlike the others, I won't be constantly breaking it by testing software on it.
The arrival of the Eee PC has triggered a shift in the household's electronic balance of power, as the lady of the house rightfully demands access to our music, contacts, calendar, photos and website - of which I've previously been the keeper.
By cobbling together a series of network drives, online services, photo editing apps and syncing tools, I've managed to grant to her access to all that content whilst still enforcing data security, integrity and version control - a process which will make an interesting blog post in itself.
My wife has long wanted the ability to easily update the family website because, as for many thirty-somethings, we've found the web is the perfect medium for sharing photos of our children with friends. Now my wife has that power, I'm concerned that her efforts in maintaining our website would be wasted. Rather than expect friends to come to our website, we need to take the photos to them. Rather than resorting to the Web 1.0 approach of dumping huge photo attachments on people via email, we've decided to take a more active interest in Facebook.
Option 2: Facebook
Publishing our family photos and status updates up on Facebook makes it easy to maintain our online presence, thanks to Facebook plugins for iPhoto and Picasa.
There's also a myriad of ways we can post to Facebook and monitor others' posts. It makes our content easily accessible to our friends and ensures they know when we add something new.
At the same time we're not bombarding them, and if they think we're too noisy they can tone us down using the advanced settings. The ability to restrict access to friends, and even sub-sets of friends, helps address some of the privacy concerns created by running an open family website.
What sealed the deal is that we can email private weblinks to non-Facebook users. This way our friends who aren't Facebook users can still see our photo galleries, but only if we email them a link. If it wasn't for that we'd still need to maintain a family site, or something like a Flickr account - which creates a whole new set of problems.
Using Facebook isn't a perfect solution, especially as it's already jumped the shark in the eyes of early adopters. I'd really like to the ability for users to create multiple profiles - such as three for family, friends and colleagues - each with their own contact details, photo galleries and wall.
As it is I've had to create a list of "work friends" and lock them out of almost everything, so I can maintain a line between my work life and private life. It's not that I don't want to interact with work colleagues, I just want to keep that interaction separate from my personal life.
The other option is to de-friend my work colleagues, which sends the wrong message. I know people who have separate work and personal Facebook accounts, but that sounds over-complicated for my needs.
Another feature I'd like to see is the ability for multiple users to share the one wall and photo gallery. My wife and I shouldn't both need to maintain separate walls and photo galleries when the whole point is to share information about our family. I'm still navigating my way through Facebook's myriad of options, so maybe there is an easy way to do this. Perhaps we could create secret invitation-only Facebook group, with just the two of us as administrators, but I'm not sure how that would work. The harder I make it for friends to view my content, the less likely they are to do so.
I tried setting up a test group with one or two friends to see how it works. Unfortunately it seems you can't create multiple photo albums within a Facebook group, which seems amazingly stupid.
One thing I am sure of is that social networking makes the idea of a family website redundant.
How do you share your family photos with the world?
Other Blog Entries written by Adam Turner:
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