Week 10, #22 Social Networking

Wow, there certainly are a lot of social network sites. MySpace seems to be on the way out from what I read, and FaceBook is very popular now with people I know. I'm not sure if I'm "professional enough" to be on LinkedIn.

I looked at the 350+ sites- wow! How do people and organizations choose? I think I'll just stick to what I've got. I was glad to see that they were organized at least. I've done the BookCrossing one before, a few years ago. I left some books in various places, but I don't know if they ever got found or not. I can't remember my log in information to go back and check.

I am starting to think the Commoncraft videos are kind of cool. Maybe I've seen too many of them. Did anyone watch "Zombies in Plain English". Well done, and funny.

The commentary about how users don't necessarily WANT the library to be on Facebook or Twitter is interesting. When people log into Facebook they aren't going there to do research. They are going there to see what their friends are doing, find out what their Hippie Name is, play Bejeweled, or Mafia Wars, or post photos of their friends and family. They aren't going to Facebook to find out info they need for their research paper, or to get a list of the New York Times Bestsellers for the week. However, Facebook is useful for librarians, and everyone else as a social network. It helps us to connect with our peers. If a librarian in Maine ends up connected to a librarian in Oregon, and they decide to get married. Maybe they will have a mutual friend in Kansas who knows of a library that is looking to hire 2 librarians. Yeah, right! But it could happen. Isn't that what CommonCraft said that social networks were all about? Extending your relationships. It might not be to our patrons though, it might be to our peers. And maybe one of our peers has posted a link to a blog about how great Cataloguers are, and how much he appreciates them. Sharing links is another great use of Facebook as well, and that's useful to all of us I think.