"So, what do you think of Google+?" That's been the question over the last couple weeks that we've been asking each other. Unless you absolutely love social network sites, it probably feels like another thing to do in a day already packed to the gills.
In my online world, I have the blog to run, tweets to post, Facebook to update, Flickr to populate, and now circles to grow in Google+. The thing about it is, that I think that this new opportunity will be worth the time we invest in it. Google+ is well thought out, beautiful, and I'm anticipating that it will be a thriving photo community.
This article by Thomas Hawk, Top 10 Tips on Google+ for Photographers will help you get oriented. It's quite good, and I appreciated Google+ more after reading it.
It's worth making time for.
I can't agree with Thomas Hawks assessment of Google +. He says don't watermark your work, because "you own it". But the way I read their TOS, Google owns it too! That may be fine for a snapshot shooter like Hawk, who displays mostly Creatuve Commons content. But I shoot licensed work and my clients might be more than PO'd to see Google using their supposed exclusive content for it's own purposes. On top of it all, I just don't have time to park myself in front of a computer any longer than I already do. I don't think I'll be joining the "in" crowd at this point.
I agree with Photogoofer after I read this about Google+
“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.â€
There is also an interesting article via the Washington Post:
Google+ may carry dangers for photographers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/google-may-carry-dangers-for-photographers/2011/07/08/gIQAr2Ea3H_blog.html
I think at this time I will staying away from Google +.
Google+ as it stands is not a photographer friendly community, proceed with extreme caution.
One of the most important things I learned during my tenure with O'Reilly Media was this paraphrase by Tim O'Reilly: "Piracy is not the problem for artists; anonymity is."
With Google+, as well as Flickr, Facebook, and any other *sharing* site, you share your work with the world. You get to choose what goes up, and what remains in your private collection. I probably post more than most. But I figure, what good is does it do me if my pictures remain on my hard drive all safe, sound, and very alone?
Now I don't have a complete story, but a friend of mine had uploaded some photos to Flickr and somehow (this is the part I'm unclear about) they got into Getty's collection and they were selling it. Well my friends client got upset over this and he ended up losing the client over it. So the moral of the story is if someone paid you to shoot something be very careful where you put it online.
As for Google+ I'm not going to bother with it for a couple reasons. The people I really care about is my real life friends and family and until they switch over I'm staying with Facebook. I don't really care about people I don't personally know too much. Also after reading "In the Plex" I'm not really sure I want Google to know too much more then they already do about me.
Not available here, I just get the "invitation only" message.
I quit Google+ after a few days - it's just not offering anything compelling over Facebook (whose "lists" are more or less equivalent to Google+'s "circles").
I don't think Facebook is particularly great, to be fair - it was just first*. But the signal-to-noise ratio is so low on these social networking sites... while I can understand someone in Derrick's role being part of all these networks, it's simply not worth losing even more of my time.
* "first" = came before Google+ - I'm not claiming it was the first social networking site (note added for the overly pedantic)