LIS 9763

   A couple of the blog posts this week have talked about professionalism on social networks, which made me think of linkedin, which is supposedly the professional's version. These came up on one of my feeds a while ago (Feb 9), and I completely forgot about them.
 
    PersonalInfoCloud.com linkedin : Social interaction design lessons learned
 
    All about how social networks can be undermined by their own designers. I found them interesting.   [-Murray]

Hi Everyone,

My first experience with Facebook was a few years ago. It was about 6 months prior to facebook being open to business and high school registrants, and then later to public registration. When I started using it, only my post-secondary education peers were able to access and create profiles. In the short time between then and now, Facebook has exploded into more than a gossip-, homework-, and image-sharing tool. It's become a resource for unofficial background checks, family reunions, and, yes, library reference.

Of the readings this week, the Farkas blog entry identified what I consider to be the most relevant thing libraries should keep in mind when exploring the possibilities offered to them by social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. While Mack, et. al.

Do libraries have a place within online social networks? I say yes, there is great potential to reach current and potential users in a variety of meaningful ways, but we must tread carefully into this territory. As Roush (2006) illustrates, there are huge numbers of inhabitants in social networks – 95 million MySpace users in 2006…and then came the ridiculously successful advent of Facebook. If all of these people lived in one physical place, they would make up one of the most populated countries on the globe!

I don’t actually understand the way Myspace works, so AADL’s Myspace page is just plain strange to me because of this. The oddest thing about the AADL Myspace page is that it has 284 billion friends. I am not sure how that is even possible since there are only about 6.8 billion people on earth. Who are these friends and where did they come from? 

...not facebooking instead of blogging.
 

When I think about Social Networking sites, the first thing that comes to my mind is the ubiquity of them. The Nielson Report has been mentioned in other blog posts this week, and I think it just goes to support the notion of their ubiquity.

 As I read this week's articles I started to reflect how my teenage daughter uses mySpace and Facebook.  I'm not convinced that MySpace is used more by teens and Facebook by Undergrads - this may have been the case a few years ago, but today I'm being told that everyone is using Facebook and that MySpace is more for music.