Thanks for dropping by! Your comment about “someone actually blogging these days” is great because I blog so infrequently; gotta try harder. :)

You raise an interesting point about Facebook’s photo application being used more than Flickr. I would argue that the Facebook photo app may be the epitome the of ease-of-use vs. functionality (and general shittiness) debate — the more they dumb it down, the more users the app attracts. Kind of depressing, actually, but I guess that would form the basis for the argument of user quality vs. quantity, as well.

YouTube may play in the same field as Flickr, but it is a different beast entirely, due mainly to its size relative to the other competitors. Plus, as interactive and engaging as it is, the vast majority of YouTube’s users don’t sign in or rate videos, let alone contribute their own. I’d love to see a study of community involvement in YouTube vs. Flickr vs. Facebook, just to see the ratios of passive usage vs. contribution in each case. I’d wager that YouTube’s ratio is much lower than the others, probably by at least an order of magnitude.

Back to the activity - while Facebook may do photo sharing half-decently and be more popular than competitors whose sole existence is to handle photo sharing, they’re still very diluted. Opening up their app platform probably made this problem exponentially worse. Unlike Apple’s iPhone app platform, where the applications are pretty isolated and don’t really intermingle, Facebook apps are injected all over the place on the site, watering down the experience for everyone. In that case, I think their dominance in the photo area will probably wane as they open up their platform more.

Great food for thought, though. Thanks!

To your point about Facebook and my assertion that the best social networks revolve around an object…it is a tough question. But I would point out that in activity theory the person (and thus the profile) is an object, so it’s not clear entirely clear how different “pure play” social networks are. More interestingly, Facebook is a much larger photo sharing site than even Flickr…so while photos aren’t the primary object they are integral to the FB experience. A while back I wrote a post wondering whether Flickr/YouTube would outlast MySpace/Facebook based on this same reasoning…folks quickly pointed out that FB was bigger than Flickr when it came to photos anyway.

http://bokardo.com/archives/will-flickr-and-youtube-outlast-myspace-and-facebook/

I think the question is still about the activity, as you suggest. An activity can be very clear (upload, store, share) photos or it may be less clear (networking with others), but as long as you provide a solid tool that supports the activity, you’ll be OK.

Thanks for the pushback!

I used the Twitter app to integrate my posts with my FB feed for a while, and disabled it pretty shortly afterwards because it was (a) too spammy, and because (b) I realized that my FB friends had little interest in hearing what I was up to a half-dozen or more times a day.

The disparity between my Twitter and Facebook status update frequency is obviously related to the completely different audiences. And even if those audiences were to merge, I’m not sure I’d want to start pushing Twitter posts back into my FB feed. I have to admit I find the few people who do it right now kind of annoying, especially if every post is prefaced by “XYZ is twittering: …”