Keeping In Touch Through The Internet

Reprinted with permission from ACP Media (NetGuide )

Social networking, photo sites such as Flickr and Zooomr, Skype and instant messaging have turned online communications into a multimedia extravaganza.

It’s amazing to think back to how email revolutionised communication last decade and how things have changed since then. Imagine attaching dozens of holiday photos to an email and firing it off to all your friends. What you’re more likely to do now is load them onto a social networking page or a photo sharing Web site, then invite other people to take a look.

Among the best of the photo websites are Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com), Snapfish (www.snapfish.co.nz), Picasa (www.picasa.google.com), Zooomr (www.zooomr.com) and Flickr (www.flickr.com). Picasa is a downloadable application from Google, which you can also use to organise your photo collection - a real bonus if you have dozens of folders of photos gathering dust in My Pictures.

From there, you can create albums on the Web and share them with friends and family. Some sites (such as Shutterfly) go further, letting you share your scrapbook projects and collages, which you can also create on the site. On Picasa, Zooomr and Flickr you can form groups with other people to share photos. You can choose whether you want just to let certain people view your pics or make them available to all users.

It’s not just a useful way of getting your pics in front of your friends, either. There are a lot of really great photographs in the public areas of these sites, which should help if you’re new to photography and want to improve your skills. And there’s the back-up factor: you’re not going to lose your treasures if your hard drive dies.

Maybe photography is not your thing but you want to connect with other people around the world who share your interests. There are approximately a bazillion forums online and it shouldn’t be hard to find one that suits your interests and communication style. Some forums have more user-friendly interfaces than others, and you might need to look around to find one whose community is one you feel comfortable with.

Many of the big newspapers and magazine sites have busy and useful forums. So if you want to share, say, recipes or cooking tips, you could join the forum on Taste magazine’s site (forum.taste.co.nz) or Foodlovers (www.foodlovers.co.nz/forum). There’s no reason to limit yourself to New Zealand sites, either; for cooking, check out one of the big international food forums, such as Epicurious (www.epicurious.com/community/forums) or the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbfood). Or perhaps you spend your leisure time game fishing, scrapbooking, knitting or chatting about your pet rabbit and want to meet people round the world who share your passion. You can take that a step further, too: give your rabbit its own page on a social networking site.

In New Zealand, Facebook dominates the social networking scene, with Bebo the popular choice for the younger set.

Facebook lets you chat, share photos and videos, play games and - the highlight for many people - satisfy your nosiness about what your old school friends and workmates are up to, and their marital status. You can search for people - by workplace or school if you like - and invite them to be your friend (and if that doesn’t take you back to the schoolyard, you’re missing something). You can do the same thing at local site Old Friends (www.oldfriends.co.nz), although it doesn’t have the features of true social networking, instead letting you get in touch with people by emailing them through the site.

Instant messaging is a fast, free and easy way of having a conversation in real time; that means, unlike with email, there’s less time spent waiting for a response. You can see when your contacts are online and you’re not restricted to two-person conversations either. The most popular are Microsoft Live Messenger (im.live.com/messenger) and Google Talk, (www.google.com/talk). Instant messenger services now also offer video conferencing and Voice over IP (that’s using the Internet to make phone calls).

The most popular method for making Internet phone calls is Skype. If you haven’t signed up to Skype, you could be spending a whole lot of money on long-distance calls that needn’t cost you anything. Once you’ve downloaded the program, you can use it to call phones, too, but it works best when it’s a computer-to-computer connection (it’s free and the quality is better; calling a phone from your computer costs around 35 cents a minute and the quality can be patchy). Best of all, if you and the person you are calling have Web cams, you can chat via video.

If you’ve left it too late to send Christmas cards (and you definitely have if you’re reading this and haven’t mailed yours), an e-card may be an option. For a New Zealand flavour, go to Save the Kiwi (www.savethekiwi.org.nz/GreetingsCard) or NZ Tourism (www.tourism.net.nz/postcards). One excellent source of e-cards is AllPosters (www.allposters.com). The site’s main business is selling posters - movies, music, art - but you can pick any of their 500,000 images and send it as an e-card, and they’re a lot more impressive than the usual corny greeting cards. You don’t have to restrict yourself to static images, either. Want boxing cats? Dancing parakeets? Original Cards (www.original-cards.com/funny_cards.html) has clips from YouTube that you can turn into video e-cards.

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