Thing 20 - Social Networking and Libraries

For this thing, I set up an account on Facebook. Despite long (!) wait times to accomplish the updates, I completed my profile, sent a bunch of invitations to my family and friends to "friend" me (nobody has, yet, boohoo), and joined a bunch of groups. I found a "23 Things on a Stick" group, the ALA Members, the MLA group, the Library 2.0 Interest Group, and one whose name just cracks me up - "Don't Mess With Me, I Worked in a Public Library." The intent of the group is to commiserate about the joys and sorrows of working in the public library environment; well, I can certainly relate to that.

I posted to the wall of 23 Things on a Stick.

Personally, I found family and friends that I did expect to be on Facebook, and quite a few that I was surprised to see. I guess one should never judge about technical inclination! I'm hoping to reconnect with some that I haven't talked to in a while.

I chose Facebook, rather than MySpace for this Thing, because it seemed a little more secure, a little more private. I know that the intent of online social networks is to be. . .sociable, but I like the fact that Facebook won't show your profile to an unregistered user.

The tool was easy enough to figure out, but as I mentioned, it seemed a little slow. I guess one wouldn't update their profile every day, but time crawled when I would wait for a simple change to be saved.

So, I will wait for my friends to befriend me, check my Facebook account regularly, and see where it leads. I can see a lot of advantage to using Facebook, both personally and for libraries.