July 26, 2010 by Simon King
The Queen is not one of the people you immediately imagine seeing on Facebook, but it seems that her Majesty is a strong advocate of social networking sites. This week sees Queen Elizabeth join Flickr, as a number of exclusive royal images are posted up on her Majesty’s account.
Royal approval is not new when it comes to technological innovation. Queen Victoria is said to have commented “Quite extraordinary” when Alexander Graham Bell showed her the telephone in 1878. Despite this, it still seems surprising when one learns that Queen Elizabeth is taking warmly to social computing sites.
The royal Flickr page shows images of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Princess Elizabeth in 1927 at one year old, the Queen with Jacob Zuma and other noteworthy pictures. Along with the Flickr representation, Queen Elizabeth also has a Twitter account, which was established in 2009. The Twitter account now has 50,000 followers and can be found at twitter.com/britishmonarchy. While the Queen does not respond to individual private messages, the feed is relatively active.
In 2007, the Queen launched her own YouTube channel, and subsequently has uploaded a video at Google’s London headquarters. She also got digital in 2006, when her annual Christmas address was turned in to a podcast and made available to the world online. This took place thirty years after she sent an e-mail from an army airbase in 1976.
When he was King, Queen Elizabeth’s father broadcast the very first Christmas speech to his British audience on the radio, in 1932, setting a precedent which it seems our own monarch is keen to continue as she embraces the digital world. Ten years later, his coronation was the very first televised broadcast, recorded in 1937.
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