Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Social Networking Sites

I first dove into Social Networking sites after participating in a library leadership institute a couple summers ago and everyone who participated was encuraged to join Facebook in order to stay in touch. I've since been a binge Facebook user - I'll use it intensely for a short while, then tune out for a while. I need to go check it again soon - and figure out how to manage it better.

I've yet to set up a myspace page, as most of my friends aren't using it - primarily only musician friends, for whom a myspace page is pretty much required anymore. I've thought about establishing one for the Hyde Park Teen Advisory Board, or the Teen room, but I need to get some feedback from the board before I dive in - I'm not sure how it would be perceived.

Lately I've been trying to be better about Linked it, and several superiors at work have recenly asked me to link to them, which I have certainly agreed to do. It does rase the issue of professional etiquette though - if a boss wanted to be my friend on facebook, how would I feel? Of course, it would depend on my relationship with my boss. Some bosses I've had I would be happy to have as a friend. Others, well, weren't always people I wanted to share my personal life with. I had an interesting experience recently with my change of jobs from Watertown to BPL. I had friends in Watertown on Facebook who I hadn't told I was considering moving to BPL, so I had to be careful about my status updates so that I was able to properly manage those relationships.

At this point, I really don't think I have time for more social networking sites - I have some friends on Good Reads but I'm still using visual bookshelf for tracking my personal reading - it just seems pointless to keep typing in my profile and uploading personal details to tons of different sites. We really need a new protocol to help us merge all this together. I recall when email first emerged, you could only email people within your own group - aol users could talk with other aol users, compuserve with other compuserve, but an AOL user couldn't talk with a Compuserve user without one of the other getting a new account. Hopefully something similar will bring this new 2.0 web together.

1 comment:

Jennifer Koerber said...

Good thoughts, all. I know that there are some efforts to give folks a single identity across multiple services (OpenID is one), but it's tough when different networks provide such different services. Of course, the other solution is companies (*cough*Google/Yahoo/MSN*cough*) buying smaller 2.0 services and combining your accounts. Not quite a Googlezon yet, but maybe someday. (eeep)