This Thing is practically anticlimactic, what with my having turned it into an in-between thing way back in June. It's good that I got three months head start on social networking before it came time to write about it, because it's taken that long to get the hang of Facebook.
At first, Facebook looked like it was in danger of drowning in inanity. The games I saw seemed silly. I'd had quite enough of posting photos after all those Flickr-related Things. It didn't look like many people I knew were on Facebook--I'm not in its biggest demographic, after all--so the social networking part wasn't working out too well.
I finally decided that Facebook's strength for me is its ability to keep one up-to-date on the minutiae in one's friends' lives. This isn't a big deal if the friends in question are local and you stay in close contact with them, but most of my friends live in different states. Even with email, we just don't stay in contact all that well, and so most communication degenerates down to birthday cards and holiday letters. And usually only the big events make it into those, so there's no context ("We're getting married!" "Married? I didn't know you were dating! Wait, who is this guy?"). Facebook encourages keeping your friends updated on anything from upcoming nuptials to whether or not you're having a bad day. Playing the online version of a board game with a friend of mine on the East Coast has resulted in more casual communication between us in a month than we've managed in the past two years.
I haven't been all that interested in the groups. I've joined a few, on topics I'm interested in, but I never remember to visit them. This lack of interest doesn't surprise me, though: I'm in groups on LibraryThing and Ravelry, and I never take the time to visit them either. I need a more personal connection than just mutual interest in a single topic. So I've joined the Library 2.0 Interest Group, but have only visited it once since then.
I looked at MySpace's homepage this morning, in the spirit of investigation. The spirit of investigation can only take one so far, however. While I appreciated that MySpace offers a rudimentary tour (Facebook apparently believes people should sign up sight unseen), advertisements for some sort of sorority program and news about Jessica Simpson left me cold. And when I ran a test-search on a name, I realized I could see much more about the people in the results than I wanted to. (After my adventure with my representative, I've got privacy issues on the brain.)
This is still yet another Thing I'm not seeing our library making much use of. Again, generational issues are a factor. I don't see a lot of teenagers or twenty-somethings having much interest in law libraries, and pushing a page or a group under their noses isn't likely to change that.
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