Thing 21 – Other Social Networks

Gather.com. So… this is supposed to represent the social networking option of more intelligent discussion, the public radio crowd, as it were? Well, all things are relative, but the level of discussion on the few posts and comments I read failed to jump out as particularly articulate or perceptive. More’s the pity.

Gather includes an interesting bullet point on their homepage, “avoid the noise of other sites”. Amen. Many of the social sites do seem to me to be very noisy – by that I mean the ratio of valuable content to useless content is very low. As an example, in looking at what was ostensibly a books group at Gather, I found among the recent postings one about studying the kabbalah and another about the hanging gardens of Babylon. Umm... why? Noise to me. Same person, repeatedly writing off-topic posts, and no one commenting seemed to notice this. Weird. Even worse, it seems that the agents and publicists have taken over the book group space at Gather. One publicist, (who also reviews the books that she represents and admits she seldom rates anything lower than a five on a five point system – that’s chutzpah) had recently posted on several of the book groups and at least one of these posts was totally off topic for the group. Don’t these marketing types understand they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg when they contaminate the content with their blurbs?

To sum up - Gather.com was a real disappointment. I hoped it might actually be a useful social networking site, but in the time I spent, I couldn’t find anything compelling on it.

Goodreads – this I had seen before because patrons of our library had mentioned it in a survey as one of the websites they visited frequently. Maybe because it has a very narrow focus, this site looks like it really might be a fun site to join if you were interested in books and reading.

I read “Building a Social Networking Environment at the Library” by Steve Campion, of Pierce County (WA) Library. Very rah-rah. But at least he had some specific modest proposals linked to present library activities.

Although I was lukewarm to Mr. Campion’s article at WebJunction, I think WebJunction itself is a really good idea. It’s my impression that librarians like to share experiences and ideas with their colleagues and help one another learn new things – WebJunction looks like a good platform for that. But the discussion part of this website is not very robust and I didn’t see a lot of evidence of social networking. On the other hand, there does look to be a lot of other good information on it, and maybe the “social” part of this will grow.

Thing 20 – MySpace & Facebook

I took a look at the MySpace pages of Hennepin County Library and Denver Public Library with my teenage niece. I thought I might as well get feedback from the target audience of these pages. I asked,“I’d like to get your opinion if these pages – would you use these pages? Would you look at them?" She said yes, she thought she might – though her reaction was definitely not “Wow, that is so cool!” She preferred the appearance of Hennepin’s page because of its ‘neon’ colors. On the other hand, she immediately noticed and commented on the song offering at Denver’s page. (She hates the song but her male cousin loves it.) Also, she thought the embedded ‘virtual shelf’ from Shelfari on Denver’s page looked ‘cool’. She, like me, is very visually oriented. (Oh, look! It’s colorful and shiny!).

I wondered, though, if kids like my niece would be likely to discover these sites. She has a profile on Facebook, not MySpace and therefore doesn’t go to MySpace. So it seems that you’d want a profile at both sites if you were a library that had decided these virtual venues were important outreach channels.

I also had her show me her Facebook profile. I got to see how she, other family members and her school friends had ‘friended’ one another – she was impressed with how fast her cousin had posted a photograph from Christmas Eve and so typed a quick note of praise. She showed me the profile of my eldest nephew and his family. In the past, she has mentioned how Facebook is useful in coordinating schoolwork group project stuff, because you don’t have to keep exchanging e-mails. What struck me about how my niece uses Facebook is that for her (and I suspect a lot of others) these social network sites reinforce her already existing social relationships. I didn’t get the impression she was using it to discover people she didn’t already know – which is interesting because that particular use of Facebook is the focus of one of the recommended readings on this Thing.

“7 things you should know about Facebook” was a persuasion piece directed at higher ed faculty and staff. It aims to educate them about social networks and their use by students. It presented the scenario of a student, Angela, using Facebook to enhance her study abroad experience by communicating with people who had a connection to the country she would be visiting. This seemed to me a carefully selected (or constructed) example of a best-case-scenario use of social networking in an educational setting. On the other hand, just because this example may not be representative, doesn’t mean it never happens this way :).

All in all, Facebook and MySpace could be an interesting way to enhance your already existing social network or expand it by discovering other people with similar interests. I can see using similar types of tools for professional or personal interests and networking, but I’m skeptical about how effectively an institution can use a tool like this, one designed for real people not corporate entities. A library profile here might tend to devolve into a marketing effort that no one wants to bother looking at. It’s one thing to see if my best friend or my cousin has added something to their profile – it might even be a picture of me! It’s quite another thing if a library touts an author’s new book or their most recent program. And how much do I care if a library has ‘friended’ another library or a subgroup of ALA? It has nowhere near the same emotional resonance.