Most of our relatives are in the UK, so we do use facebook for sharing photos and videos with them, and also use skype or gmail video chat too. There are lots of photo sharing only sites you could use instead of facebook, which don't have the distractions of facebook - e.g. flickr (can also use for video), snapfish, picasa - if you want the photos to be private you will have to get your relatives to sign up too. Flickr is my personal favourite because it stores photos at full resolution so I can get them back if I lost my electronic copy - flickr also does printing (in Australia via Snapfish) so if you allow it your contacts (eg. family) can print off their own photos.

With my parents we video chat almost every day for 10 mins, with PIL's probably once a week, and I upload photos to facebook several times a week (I get hassled if I don't but - as we live on other side of world to them, they will probably get to see DD in real life at most once a year (if was reliant on us going back there would be more like once every four years) I think is definitely worth the time and hope that can continue to do it when I go back to work fulltime).