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Comment by techiferous | Hacker News Reader

> wouldn't it be easier to email the pics to the friends directly?

I think you're underestimating the value of organizing the information into one place. And I'm sure there are/will be other features than just picture sharing.

> I dont think people would be comfortable with idea of sending it to a third party website...facebook album with proper privacy settings is much better option

This strikes me as a tad contradictory. People wouldn't trust a third party with these pictures but facebook is somehow okay.

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facebook provides a better way of organizing them via tags. and regarding trusting facebook, people are motivated to learn facebook privacy settings, since they are using it everyday.

Finally a person savvy enough to use such website/ email based service, must already be proficient with Facebook settings.

This site could work well for someone who is not that technically proficient, but had a tech-savvy friend who created a group. A layperson could easily handle visiting the site to look at other people's photos, and e-mailing pictures to the site when they want to share them.

Also, you leave out the possibility that Facebook might alter the privacy settings without warning, which could catch even a savvy user by surprise.

We are also building out features to make it much easier to upload single photos, albums, videos, as well as tag users, invite friends from FB into the group, etc... baby steps.

The problem with Facebook settings is not merely that they are hard to find, hard to use, and tedious to set.

The problem is that you can twiddle the knobs and dials, but you have no confidence that they are connected to anything. Or that, if connected today, they will remain connected tomorrow. Facebook has made it clear that your privacy settings are not particularly important to them. They change the settings mechanism and defaults every six months, and somehow every such change tends to start leaking information for advertising or SEO purposes. Why, it's almost as if Facebook was being run by this guy:

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

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