Facebook makes people tagging a breeze

I was reading the comments on Fred Wislon's blog about how MySpace seemed to be loosing some of it's buzz among teens and how Facebook seemed to be getting stronger so I decided to log into my Facebook account (not many NU alums from '81 hanging out there!) and see what was happening.

What I found was that Facebook users have a lot of pictures and more significantly, that the people in those pictures were all well tagged with their names. I've been on this kick since meeting Greg Elin, of FotoNotes several years ago and here the Facebook developers have provided a really nice and simple interface for tagging people.



Though this does not make a huge difference for me since I don't have a huge group of friends but for the typical Facebook user it is great to be able to identify the people in the pictures you are looking at and then if you are within your school, you can quickly link to their profiles.



I think it is hard to build a new pure social network just around photos, Flickr has that base pretty well covered, but they are a certainly a core service for a more "communications-oriented" social networking service. From what I've seen, many social network service providers should be spending more time on enhancing their photo features. Facebook sure has done a nice job of making tagging easy and that adds a tremendous amount of value to those photos.