Introduction to Facebook – Lesson 1 – Photo Tagging

Are your parents on facebook? So are mine… here is the first in what will definitely be a series of tutorials on facebook (or iFace, as my mom calls it) and web2.0 standards for newbies…

Tagging- tagging is a way for people to classify items (online, usually) based on words they associate with them. You might see a picture of casey and tag it “dog, cute, puppy, lab…”. You might bookmark a website about facebook (on delicious.com or such) and say it is “goodread, news, technology, etc). It’s referred to (by groundswell) as the “folksonomy” of the internet and allows you to find information based on your own classification, plus teaches the computers and other users how to classify that information.

Facebook tagging – facebook lets you tag your photos with the names of actual people who are part of facebook. They have a lot of features surrounding this. One such feature is that if you go to my profile ( on facebook), you will see that there are >100 photos of me. I may have submitted about 20 of them, but I was “tagged” in other people’s photos. This means there is no need for me to have my own copy of their photos of me, plus others dont have to dig through my photos to see me. The more you tag yourself, the more people will be able to see you in those photos.

I, personally, use facebook photo tagging as a way for people to stay current with what I am doing…. example… After uploading my photos from halloween, I tagged myself and my wife in the photos. That resulted in a “news feed” item in facebook that said “Ben tagged himself in this photo”. All of my friends get that “news feed item” and can then go see that photo. Having done this, many of my friends commented on those photos and told me how ridiculous my costume looked. It’s my way of telling people what I am up to, without actually having to do anything.

Many of facebooks principles are based on the “beacon” approach. I am active on facebook, so that whoever cares can visit my page to see what I have been up to since I am broadcasting it like a beacon! It sure beats sending all of my friends photos after every party.