Twitter Archives - Robert W. Madden Photography

When Twitter first appeared, I felt like many others that I did not need to know how someone I was following was enjoying breakfast. But my views have changed.

Now, I tweet almost daily, and each tweet has an image attached. What these tweets have become is a visual diary of images that are special to me and I want to publish. Publishing is the key here.

On this page, I have included only pictures from tweets from the last month. I have published 18 others during the month, but the images selected here show the variety of my subject matter.

Dali Museum, Tampa

Just Ducky, Orlando

Orlando

In my career, photography was a way to share experiences with an audience, and publishing in National Geographic magazine guaranteed millions of viewers worldwide.

In the global, networked community of today, the Internet is a nascent communications tool, which provides expanding opportunities for us to share information and experiences. We have the opportunity to re-define how stories are communicated or published; hence, the visual diary.

There are many ways to use social media to publish. Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Vine are some of the current opportunities. As a photographer, I need to use those that feature photography as an integral part of the published piece.

Hotel, Both Tweet and Instagram

Sailing, Tampa Bay

Valentine Duck, Orlando

Following is how I determine the best way to communicate my work.

Twitter. As explained above, this is for daily photography, some of it quite pedestrian, but I try to make it interesting. Many but not all of my tweets are taken with my smart phone. The captions need to be succinct, which is a good thing. I use many hashtags that increase the distribution of the tweet.

Instagram. I publish some of my better images here, usually timing them with specific events. As a member of The Photo Society, my Instagrams have over a million followers, and more than 15,000 likes (not looks, likes!). The qualities of the images on this site are exceptional, and I try to have comparable pictures up as Instagrams. Sometimes I also publish them tweets.

Oil Slick with Contrails

Shovel for Dollars

Wind Shovel

I use Facebook to let people know what I am up to. My tweets are automatically republished there, and because of this, I post often.

My YouTube channel is filled with themed slideshows of images from around the world – Patagonia. Venice, Peru, Tanzania – as well as workshops where student work is featured.

I have a monthly newsletter where I explore photographic subjects of interest. You can sign up for it on this page.

My blog (you are reading one) about many things, from instructional tutorials to items such as photographic exhibits that I have recently seen.

Car Hood Tweet/Instagram

Gulls on Ice

White Horse, White Snow

I have turned Twitter into my daily visual diary, I find that it keeps me alert to the world around me, and through my images I try to make sense of it all.

Homeless in DC

Presidential Limo

Sunset on the Chesapeake Bay

Silver Swans

Cold Morning

Recently I found an illuminating infographic in the New Yorker magazine that shows how social media sites gather information about their users. As explained in the New Yorker:

“In short, they see people as data, breaking their users down into categories that fit neatly into a machine-readable stream of information. This data is gathered not only from what users share on the social networks themselves but also through programs that plug into these networks by way of an application programming interface, better known as an A.P.I. For instance, think of any time you signed in to a Web site or an application with your Facebook or Twitter login, used a Facebook or Twitter app that was made by a third-party company like Zynga, or clicked a Like button at the top of an article. In different ways, those applications all talk to social networks via their A.P.I.s.”

“This information flows both ways: the social networks receive data from applications and, in turn, they can provide developers and advertisers with data about their users. …Much of the information that they have about users remains internal, and is not made available to developers via their A.P.I. Taken together, they are a way of conceiving of how social networks see you. Facebook may provide items like your name, statuses, photographs, favorite television shows, friend requests, religious views, privacy settings, events, and check-ins. (What it can make available to these applications depends on your privacy settings.) For instance, when you play Candy Crush Saga on Facebook—currently the most popular game on the social network—the developer, King, has access to what Facebook describes as “your basic information,” which includes your name, profile picture, gender, user I.D., friends, and “any other information you made public.” In the Twitter A.P.I., as Paul Ford has explained, you are an amalgam of your tweets, username, favorites, retweets, location, language spoken, and so on.”

Here is the infographic developed by the New Yorker.

For my business pages, I get access to much of this information and it helps me understand how users are addressing my site.

For my personal pages, I rarely post to these sites, as I value my personal privacy and do not want the professional pictures I take to be all over the net.

ADDENDUM June 29, 2014

Here is another way the Facebook manipulates your data.