Many of you may remember ArtShare, the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook application. ArtShare had good intentions and was an effort to be inclusive to many different types of users: institutions could use it to share works in their collection on Facebook profiles and pages; artists could upload and share their own work; and art lovers could install the app and customize their profiles with the works they liked the most.  The app worked pretty well during early days, but we quickly found that Facebook’s changes often came without much warning and every time Facebook would change their API, we’d have to drop everything to fix the app.  API changes were one thing, but Facebook soon started changing profile layouts and with those shifts in design we saw the Facebook community moving away from app usage.  It has become clear that keeping up with Facebook’s shifting priorities is too difficult with our limited staffing and with fewer people using the application we are pulling the plug.

I wish we could easily pull the plug on more than just ArtShare, but Facebook does not make things easy.  We’ve got a legacy Brooklyn Museum group—a holdover from the days before pages—that should ideally be deleted, but guess what?  In order to delete a Facebook group, you have to delete every member from the group before the group can be deleted.  Did you catch that?? There are more than a thousand people in this group and deleting them all before we can retire the group is simply not a practical use of time. Until Facebook has a better solution for deletion, we’ve had to resort to changing the group to a hidden status and posting a note to redirect current members to the Museum’s Facebook page.  This is a heck of a messy way to deal with a problem that should have an easy fix.

After five years, we are finally pulling the plug on the Myspace profile.  We’ve muddled over this one for quite some time and most people will wonder why we bothered to keep this at all because “everyone has moved to Facebook,”  but things are more nuanced than that. As a community-minded organization we are very conscious of the work Danah Boyd has done on Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and Myspace. While this article was written in 2007, many of the issues it brings up are still true today and given the diversity of our audience and a mission that holds accessibility paramount, cutting and running from Myspace never seemed like a sound idea.  Because we had started to see less usage, we got a little closer to shutting down the profile last year, but ended up needing a more active presence there when Myspace Music became a sponsor for Who Shot Rock—that was enough to stop deletion in its tracks. At this point, however, it’s become more difficult to maintain the profile—we are so inundated with spam on the site that sorting through what might be legit posts is too arduous.  With lower usage overall combined with higher difficulty to manage the platform, it is now time to go.

Generally, you’ll see us continue to jump into social platforms as we see our audience gathering there.  We feel it’s important to have a presence where people are knowing they may not come directly to www.brooklynmuseum.org, but as with any technology we will watch the landscape and adjust as we go along.  As audience moves from one platform to another or as platforms modify beyond recognition, we’ll change with them and that can mean making difficult and carefully studied decisions about when to stay and when to go.

My own personal props have to go out to Victor over at MoMA, who wins the gold star for bending over backwards to figure out the best way they could participate and still ensure everything falls into the public domain. Victor, that’s dedication! CJN212, thanks for the legwork over there. I have to say from an organizer standpoint, I couldn’t be more thrilled about how many institutions took the leap work with us on what will hopefully become a massive cross-institution community collaboration!

Not so super-secret meetup for the Wikipedia NYC Chapter. Topic of discussion? You guessed it: Wikipedia Loves Art. Wiki peeps and guests including Denise and Hazel from the MET, Victor from MoMA and moi. Check out that awesome ceiling w/ globe lights at Columbia University.

In the next week, we’ve got a lot of work to do to get scavenger hunt lists published and many of us are making final preparations for meetups. All details, including the lists will be published to the Wikipedia Loves Art Flickr group, so keep an eye on things over there (and congrats to us for creating what might be the longest Flickr group description…ever). There’s even a discussion getting started about the best way to shoot in museums to avoid glare off cases while working with no flash, no tripod restrictions.

Now that we have institutions, we need photographers! Please help us spread the word. Remember, because of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s offer, there’s a way you can participate from almost anywhere in the United States even if your local museum is not on the participant list. Good luck everyone, we are looking forward to seeing your shots!

Incidentally, we’ve made some adjustments to ArtShare so it will work on pages. This is pretty cool, because it means if you add your museum’s collection to ArtShare, then create a page for your institution, you can install ArtShare on that page and have your collection shuffle right there. In addition to this improvement, we’ve also made selecting work a bit easier (there’s a preview function now) and the V&A just added their collection to the app!

We’ve been on MySpace for a while now and we just confirmed our 10,000th friend request (above). I thought a look back would be in order. We were lucky early on. Ellis G., a Brooklyn-based artist, had a lot of friends and thankfully sent bulletins to all of them telling them about our profile. “Add this user” called Ellis and suddenly we had a lot friends which provided a nice start (thanks, Ellis). …but, with many friends comes….spam and lots of it.

Accounts on MySpace get hijacked all the time and when you’ve got as many friends as we do, I’d estimate at least one or two friends of ours get taken over per day. When accounts get hijacked, bots start sending a lot of spam. 10,000 + 2 hijacked accounts per day = you can imagine how much spam this generates. So, the first thing we had to do was turn on comment approval. I’m not a fan of moderated comments, but we had no choice. If we didn’t moderate, you’d see so many ads for gift cards and ringtones in our profile…well, it would be a little overwhelming.

Moderation [shudder] stopped the spam from going live, but we were still dealing with it in the comment approval process and this was getting really time consuming. Just recently, we had to break down and turn on CAPTCHA. Activating this has an upside and a downside. Upside: for the most part, we stemmed the tide of spam and can still allow images in comments, so friends can share their art and announcements with us. Downside: CAPTCHA is not accessible, which is really terrible and goes against everything we do at the Museum. This was another one of those situations where we felt like we had no choice, the amount of spam was driving us into a hiding. This was and continues to be a difficult decision for us. Has anyone else found better ways to deal with this situation? Advice would be much appreciated.

In the mean time, this is an open letter to MySpace: Tom, get with the program! We love MySpace and are proud to be there, but give us decent tools to fight spam on your site, so we don’t have to resort to CAPTCHA. If you insist on CAPTCHA, at least implement and alternate audio version to maintain accessibility. Audio CAPTCHA is not a perfect solution by any lengths, but it’s something…

As it turns out, one of our programmers here, Mike Dillon, had been poking around Facebook on his own and was eager to develop on this platform. We had a brief conversation about it and the rest, I have to say, is all his doing. By the way, I’m posting on this because Mike is more the punk-rock-i-don’t-do-blogs type, but have to give credit where credit is due ’cause ArtShare rocks!

What can you do with ArtShare? Well, you can select works from the Brooklyn Museum collection to display on your profile. But then, because social networking is about connecting and seeing what others contribute to the social fabric, anyone can also use ArtShare to upload their own work and share it with others. You can use ArtShare to select a wide variety of work, then each time your profile is loaded a different work will be displayed at random from your selections.

For the past week, we’ve been uploading (OK, well, Francesca Ford has been uploading…thanks, Francesca) our collection highlights into the application, but then we hit a snag when we got to our Contemporary collection. Since artists often retain the copyright on contemporary works, we stopped uploading and started making phone calls and sending emails to artists and galleries seeking permission to include their work in the first phase of this project. I have to extend my thanks to the artists (Jules de Balincourt, Barron Claiborne, Anthony Goicolea, Rashid Johnson, Lady Pink, Kambui Olujimi, Suzanne Opton, Andres Serrano, Swoon, Yoram Wolberger) who saw the worth in this kind of endeavor and said go for it. We will continue to contact more of the contemporary artists in our collection and add to these initial works, but we wanted to pause now and launch ArtShare for beta testing.

If you work at another institution and want to share your museum’s collection this way, we can set you up with your own tab in ArtShare. When we set this up for you, your institution’s logo will be displayed alongside the works that you upload, so they are easily identifiable as being a part of your collection. More information on the specifics of how to do this can be found here.

Have fun, help us test and let us know the bugs so we can iron things out. Oh and, while you are there, add me as a friend.