A picture says a thousand words, and a video says a thousand pictures. How have social networking sites integrated photo- and multimedia-sharing capabilities into their interfaces? What advantages do they have over purely photo-sharing sites? What social issues arise?

Out of the mass social networking sites, Facebook has been the most successful at having its own photo-sharing interface. Facebook allows user to upload unlimited photos, and its interface allows users to upload multiple photos at once. These photos are meant to be shared with the user’s friends and networks, not for public use on the Internet. Finally, Facebook lets its users set individual privacy levels for albums: one can be shared with the network, another can be limited to just friends.

MySpace, while an overall successful site, has a limited interface for photos. The only pictures a user can directly upload to MySpace are profile pictures. But because MySpace’s design allows users to edit the HTML of their profiles, users can easily link to or display pictures uploaded to outside clients such as Photobucket.com.

Facebook’s photo-sharing feature is much more integrated within the site. Users’ profiles have links to all the photographs they appear in, whether uploaded by themselves or a friend. Myspace’s photo features are much more limited, especially considering that Myspace is built more on sharing entertainment and media than Facebook.

Both MySpace and Facebook rely on external sites’ servers to store uploaded photos. A lot of storage is necessary for these photos, especially when there are several versions of a picture, such as a full-size and a thumbnail-size version.

One type of picture-sharing site prevalent on the Internet is image storage sites. Sites like Photobucket.com and Image Shack allow users to upload images of any size for free and link to them from other sites. Before sites like Facebook and Flickr became popular, these sites were commonly used for people to share albums, but in some regards they have become obsolete. Users of sites like MySpace, who rely on external picture servers to share pictures in their profile, continue to give these sites traffic.

On the other hand, Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites like Flickr are thriving. These sites create a kind of social network based on sharing photos with the network, being able to comment and rate photos, and browse for photos based on subject and style. This style of network is especially helpful for amateur and professional photographers who would like to get critique for their work to meet others with similar interests (link from imseo.org). Thus, Web 2.0 photo sharing sites follow a model similar to the art-sharing site Deviantart.com, although Deviantart is more fine-arts oriented and has not reached as broad an audience as flickr.

Video-sharing sites have been common ever since users had Internet connections strong enough to stream video, but sites of the past have been unreliable or were not free services. In the past couple years, the video-sharing site YouTube has set new standards for video sharing. YouTube’s interface is free for viewers, and users can upload videos for free or even be paid in advertising revenue if their videos are popular enough. While videos are very expensive to store and play back because of their sheer filesisze, YouTube succeeded at getting enough revenue through advertising and investment to provide its services for free. YouTube is also successful because of compatibility; it accepts many formats for uploading; it has its own video playback interface built into the site, instead of having to rely on client codecs; and it allows users to embed their videos into personal sites.

MySpace introduced a video sharing feature in spring 2006. It was a natural move for MySpace to want to compete with YouTube, because its user base is primarily hip teenagers and young adults who already share user-generated music on the site. However, while only band profiles on MySpace can upload music, any user can upload and share videos. Just like YouTube, its videos are open to the public and embeddable from other sites.

Facebook does not host its users’ videos, but it has a website-sharing feature called Shares. When users Share videos on YouTube, Facebook detects that the link is a video and plays it directly on its user’s profile.

Social networking and photo-sharing sites allow users to upload thousands of photos and share them with any number of people. Sites like Facebook in particular have given their users so much freedom to upload and so much control over privacy, they rarely consider the appropriateness of every individual image on the Internet. A problem arises in that there is little sense or discussion of netiquette regarding photo sharing. Ten years ago, Internet users considered it risky to put a non-professional photograph of oneself on a public page, but nowadays people post pictures of all sorts, of themselves, their family, their friends, and random people they meet. But by no means have people’s qualms about pictures of them online ended. A significant fraction of Internet users, both tech-savvy teenagers and older adults, believe that it is a violation of privacy to upload a picture of someone else in a swimsuit. Undoubtedly, there are dozens of other kinds of pictures that could be argued to be a violation of privacy, such as pictures of private spaces, parties, social events, and drug use.

Also, when people are able to share media on the Internet for free, legal issues come into play. One example that has gotten a significant amount of legal and news attention is YouTube, whose users have uploaded copyright media such as movie clips and TV show episodes. The issue of copyrighted content that was previously associated with peer-to-peer filesharing programs now also affects the web itself. Because YouTube hosts so many videos and its users have few limits as to the amount of videos they can upload, a lot of content that users do not own has made its way onto the site. YouTube and other social networking sites generally make their users confirm that they have the right to upload and share media before they are allowed to upload it by checking a box on the site. In doing this, they shift the responsibility to the user.