Photos being resized automatically

I mentioned in my earlier post that unadulterated and better resolutions photos would be available in my Facebook account. Well I did some experiment and found this not to be true.

My original photo is 2.26MB at 2448 x 3264 pixels. When uploaded to Facebook, it was automatically reduced to 43KB at 453 x 604 pixels. When uploaded to this Blog, it was reduced to 217KB at 1200 x 1600 pixels, regardless of whether I chose “small”, “medium” or “large”. So this Blog delivers better resolutions photos than Facebook.

My first thought was perhaps the article published in the New York Times website on 26 April 2009 has some basis. It claims that Facebook is considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs been delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses. The article states that some global web companies (like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Veoh) are thinking of restricting access or lowering service standards to regions, like the developing countries, which prove costly to operate as the revenue generated from advertising in these regions does not cover the cost of operation, in an effort to boost their profit margins. The popularity and growth of these sites in developing countries eat up costly bandwidth which does not commensurate with revenue generated.

So to test whether this is true, I send my original 2.26MB photo to a friend in US and asked him to upload it to his Facebook account and then download it. The result was the same: the photo was automatically resized to 43KB at 453 x 604 pixels. Perhaps Singapore is not considered to be one of these “developing countries”.

Anyway, I will still reduce the pixels size, for faster download, and marked each photos, for security, that are uploaded to this Blog. I may or may not put another in my Facebook account. Thus if you are interested in any of the photos here and want the original just let me know and I will email it to you.

Time to be a netizen again...

I was asked to start a website or a blog. I had requests to join Facebook. But I didn't felt the need to do so. I thought perhaps I'll do one or all of the above perhaps when I turned 50! That seems like a good time to do so isn't it?

I had a personal website back in the late 90s (1997 to 1998) hosted on GeoCities. Even paid monthly subscription of US$6 to super-sized my website. Received positive comments, but eventually gave up as maintaining a site requires time and effort especially when you have self-imposed high standards.

Well I decided its time to be a netizen again. Joined FB and started this blog: a kind of scrapebook for me to scribble thoughts and things rather than focus on just one theme in the case of a website.

BTW I learned that GeoCities would cease operation soon after 15 years. The shift from personal website to social networking site is just part of the web evolution. Would FB also cease operation after 15 years in 2019 or even earlier when some other apps/services emerge? I suppose I will resist it initially but will probably embrace it if I want to continue to be a netizen.