Dropping Facebook and Restarting Flickr

Recently I’ve become a bit disillusioned with Facebook. The changes to their privacy settings has had much publicity – stating that it’s now even easier for Facebook to broadcast or advertise your existence on the web. If I remember correctly, the changes – which are officially publicised to protect you better – does in fact generate more hits on web searches and therefore generates more advertising revenue for the Facebook organisation. Coupled with the fact that for the last couple of years I’ve not been that active on Facebook and updating it seems slightly pointless most of the time. I don’t want or need 500+ friends, besides which those that claim to have 500+ friends, I would question if they are actually friends at all.. Would you go out for a drink with all these people, would you honestly call them your ‘friend’? Added to this the pathetically inadequate photo system. Yes, granted it’s good if you want to post a pic of you and your ‘friend’ having a drink together or wanting to post pictures of your kids opening their christmas prezzies so that grandma can see. But if you try to take photography seriously, then the photo’s you publish on their are horribly degraded from their original quality. All in all I’ve decided that I no longer value Facebook in my busy schedule and have now deleted my account.

Speaking of photo’s. I’ve posted before how due to BT Internet’s lack of flexibility caused me to lose my previous Flickr account. Now please don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved Flickr, and found it very easy to use and a very good platform to display your work. For a time I was trying different methods of displaying my photo’s through a different medium, such as here on this very blog. For a time it worked, but when I have lots of ‘incoming’ photos, it does start to takes it’s toll. I couldn’t escape the fact that Flickr provided everything I needed. Therefore after Christmas, I decided that enough was enough and signed up for a NEW Flickr account. And truth be told, it’s wonderful to be back. Oh how I missed you dear Flickr.
I’ve put a link to my flickr photo’s on the Photo’s page of this blog (see the top of the page) for now. Unless I can find a reliable (and working) WordPress Flickr integration plugin.  The url for anyone interested is http://www.flickr.com/cliffgettings

Edit: Now found a Flickr / WordPress plugin that I can actually get working, thanks to the Flickr Photo Album for WordPress