The world’s tamest and lamest Facebook page: mine.

Last week I did a Library Lunch & Learn presentation on Social Software. “Lunch & Learn” is our weekly series of informal presentations on largely extra-curricular matters with library-provided pizza and soft drinks. I had a pretty good turnout, even including some students which is always nice.

The page I made for the presentation is a bit sparse, consisting mostly of links without a whole lot of context. We talked a lot about MySpace and Facebook. I had to admit that I wasn’t much of an expert in these social networking applications (my social software interests lie more in the sharing bookmarks in del.icio.us or photos in Flickr) and I felt a bit like an old fart: “Hey, I have been reading in Time magazine about this nifty MySpace that all the kids are into these days!” But we talked about the social dynamics of these kinds of sites and the way people choose to present themselves online. We also discussed some of the problems and concerns that have been raised about how much people reveal about themselves online.

Let me tell you, it can be a little nerve-wracking to show MySpace and Facebook in a session like this, not only for fear of looking square, but for fear of bringing up risqué, crude or otherwise inappropriate material. I’m sure there is a lot more to these sites than this, but I kept remembering what Nathan Torkington wrote on O’Reilly Radar a few months ago: “MySpace and Facebook are all about getting laid and finding parties.”. Looking around on Facebook feels a bit like wandering through a dorm and looking at what people put on their doors; not exactly an invasion of privacy, since they put it out there for all to see, but not exactly un-creepy.

Examples? When I search for groups that have the word “librarian” or “library” I get “Librarians are Hot” and “I Would Totally Have Sex In the Library.” I don’t think I really want to touch either of those…

That doesn’t mean that a library can’t make a MySpace or Facebook presence work. Bill Drew and Jean Ferguson report some successes with Facebook on Web4Lib and Aaron Schmidt writes about his library’s MySpace page over at walking paper. But for now I’m leaning towards what Meredith Farkas said on Web4Lib: I’m not sure students are that interested in finding us on Facebook.

For me, though, it is worth using MySpace or Facebook or Flickr or whatever just to get experience with these kinds of tools. At the moment, I am unconvinced that any of these tools can really do a heck of a lot for a library. My library’s Flickr page has been fun and useful (and I have some ideas to use it further), but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t “helped our users kick ass” as Kathy Sierra would have it at Creating Passionate Users.

What it does do, though, is give us a low- or no-cost way to play with these social software tools and get a better understanding of what people now expect from the web and web applications. You can set up an account on any of these sites in a matter of minutes and see for yourself what the fuss is about. Talking about tags is fine, but when you start actually tagging bookmarks yourself on del.icio.us or searching by tag in Flickr, you get a real understanding of why tags are springing up everywhere, despite their drawbacks from a “control” or “authority” perspective. When you notice that the URLs in del.icio.us are human-readable (what do you suppose you find at http://del.icio.us/tag/library?) you start to wonder why online databases don’t have similar URLs.

It is important for librarians to have a hands-on understanding of what’s happening here. Soon, we won’t be calling it “social software” or “web 2.0″ or “the read/write web” anymore. We’ll just call it “the web.” I have more to say about that, but I think I’ll have to leave it for a later post.

Tags: library, social_software, facebook, myspace