Wedding Photos and Facebook

There seems to be a lot of discussion about social networking these days. The movie “The Social Network,” about the founding of Facebook by wunderkind and now billionaire Mark Zuckerman is garnering very positive reviews. (We saw it a couple of weeks ago and would give it 4 Penguins, no question asked / I am reading the book Accidental Billionaire right now too.) It is a #hashtag topic, with pros and cons and conflicts and confidentiality being discussed in all manners of the media, from CNN to internet blogs, from Facebook to Twitter. Our family actually had a discussion about the seeming demise of Facebook and what might replace it. You could tell that there was going to be problems in Facebook’s future when the internet meme “my mother’s on Facebook” became such an indictment. As you might guess, this influx of adults has the kids all tied up in knots. Well, a few weeks ago I experienced what might be the real essence of the value of Facebook to all of its 500 MILLION followers – wedding pictures!

We went to a wedding a couple of Saturdays ago, It was at 2 pm. The reception at 6pm was at an aquarium, some 2 hours away. The families of these people are far flung including us in New England as well as North Carolina, Florida and Belgium, among other places.

In the old days, what this meant was that after the film was printed, maybe a second set was made and sent to someone, or you waited until the next big family event to look at the photographs. It could be months easily and I have looked at wedding photos for the first time two years after a wedding took place.

Beside the lack of timeliness in this process. you are looking at only a small selection of photos taken. What about the ones Aunt Mabel took? Didn’t anyone get a picture of Uncle Pete with the lampshade on his head? Did you see that little kid steal the show on the dance floor? You get the idea, right?

Well Facebook has changed all this. As we were driving home from the wedding on Sunday, Mrsfabp turned to me and said something like “I wonder when we will get to see some photos of the wedding”. MollieJupiter, snickered and said they probably are already posted on Facebook and sure enough by 5 pm on Sunday, less that 24 hours after the reception, there were some 150 photographs posted by the family. By late that evening there were more than 300 and by the next day there were well over 500 pictures of the wedding and reception posted by a number of people.

Now this is something Facebook does well, sharing the information to all who might be interested. Plus now other people can be directed to the photos with a simple email link. All I can think is how much my dad would have loved being able to share the 500 photographs of clouds he took from the plane on the first trip we took to California when we were kids. Much easier than sitting through 17 Kodak Carousel Slide holders of the same pictures!