23 Mobile Things #12: Books, Books, & More Books

I first heard about Wattpad late last year, when reading Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, but the description in the book hadn't really given me a good sense of how the site worked—something about a social network of readers and writers, fanfics and self-published works. Now I had an excuse to look at it closely.

The Wattpad app itself is easy to use: install, set up an account, choose a few favorite genres, and start reading. Mind you, the app started off by recommending books in genres like Romance and Adventure that I had specifically not listed as ones I'm interested in. (This probably won't be your go-to app for reader's advisory.) I hadn't realized that Wattpad had out-of-copyright classics as well as modern writing—I may finally get around to reading "The Picture of Dorian Gray." If you're comfortable reading on a tablet (I haven't tried Wattpad's iPhone app yet), you'll be fine reading things on Wattpad. The font is clear and navigation is intuitive.

Wattpad is a social network as well as a reading app, which will take some getting used to on my part. I mean, Amazon is sort of trying to promote social reading by giving you the option of making your Kindle notes and highlighting public, but Wattpad goes far beyond this (perhaps this is why Amazon acquired Goodreads). Naturally, the app offers you the standard option of inviting your friends from other social networks to come join you. I'm guessing that if I did have friends on Wattpad, the news feed would be showing me what they're up to, and not just Wattpad's recommendations for what to read next. But I'm used to this sort of thing from being on LibraryThing and Goodreads. What I'm not accustomed to is social networking practically written into the text itself. The book I chose was peppered with comment counts (this is the part that's sort of like the Kindle option of seeing what other readers have highlighted). Intrigued, I clicked through on a few of them. Some comments were about how much the readers were enjoying the book, some were asking for clarification on one point or another, some were offering editorial advice. The author was participating in the discussion at points, which has the potential to be really interesting. But I also found the discussions distracting, because I had to stop reading the book itself to read the comments. It's like trying to listen to the commentary on a DVD and watch it simultaneously—I have to commit to one or the other, not both. And completely unlike LibraryThing, Goodreads, or Kindle, Wattpad invites you to write your own stories. One tap on the Create icon, and a blank screen with keyboard appears: no obstacles between you and the muse. Whoa.

Okay, this is another app I'll be hanging onto for a while to explore further. Unfortunately, Wattpad hasn't solved the problem of how to find the good stories in these millions of self-published works, and it'll probably take me a while before I trip over one on my own. Not surprisingly, I can't see any use for this app in a law library. If someone wanted to read fanfiction, Wattpad can certainly deliver it to them. Do patrons ask to read self-published works that aren't fanfics? I'd think that reading the library's e-books might be more satisfying simply because most of them will have been edited at some point in the publication process. Of course, if the patron wants the social networking experience while reading, then they're probably going to want something like Wattpad, or maybe Goodreads or LibraryThing. (Yes, the perennial question: What do patrons want?)

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Another free source of fanfiction is Archive of Our Own (AO3). This isn't an app, but the site can be bookmarked on a tablet or smartphone. It has a much better search engine than Wattpad, allowing you to specify precisely what you're looking for. Membership is required to comment on works or create your own, but you don't need to be a member to read the stories.

23 Mobile Things #10: Sharing Photos

For this Thing, I tackled Instagram. I knew I knew at least one person who uses Instagram; I couldn't think of anyone who uses Snapchat. Besides, I don't need my pictures to self-destruct in five seconds.

Instagram has been pretty easy to set up and to use. As it turned out, I know 22 people on Instagram, although it looks like only three of them use it with any regularity. This may be another one of the social media sites that people sign up for out of curiosity and then never get into the habit of using. But this gave me a good start for people to follow, and a few of the 22 have even followed me back. Oh, my soaring popularity!

What little I knew of Instagram before signing up had left me wondering what the point was. It's hard for me not to think of it as visual Twitter—that is, if you created Twitter, but you had people post a photo instead of  a sentence or two, you'd have Instagram. And hey, there are a lot of people out there who are just as visual as they are verbal, or more so, and maybe that was all there was to it. So I hadn't figured I needed to join, because I like Twitter, and the few times I've wanted to post pictures, it's been easy to do. It's not as easy to post photos to Facebook, but it's not horrendously complicated either. But yeah, I can see now that it's just that much easier to do so through Instagram: take the photo, edit it, add captions and commentary, and direct it to Twitter, Facebook, and/or other destinations, all from within the Instagram app.

I'm happy to say that Instagram has motivated me to use my phone camera more. I still plan to take most of the pictures for my blogs with my digital camera, because I want them to be higher quality, but Instagram encourages quick pics to be shared on impulse with friends, which is perfect for the phone camera. And since I finally have a phone camera that can take decent pictures without a lot of fuss, using Instagram is more feasible than it was in the past. So I'm liking it much more than I thought I would, and I'm leaning towards continuing to use it after I've finished this post. But I'm still a bit concerned about that overlap. How many more general social media networks can the world support, anyway? Perhaps Instagram is different enough from Facebook and Twitter by dint of its photos-first focus to survive and thrive. We'll see.

Professionally, this is another app/service I can't see much use for. Everything I've read says that currently Instagram is hot with teenagers and college students, an age range not known for using law libraries. Indeed, a libraries-and-social-media webinar I attended last year stated bluntly that if teenagers weren't a major patron group for your library, don't bother getting your library on Instagram. Of course, if Instagram is one of the social media networks that endures, its users will age. Some of them will eventually become first law students, then lawyers, and then maybe we'll use it to reach them then [insert evil cackle here].

23 Mobile Things #8: Social Media Management Tools

You know, I'd sort of forgotten that the point of HootSuite is to manage multiple social media accounts. I suspect this is because my social media accounts don't need much managing. While I'm on several social networking sites, I'm on many of them for some other reason than socializing. (Usually databases.) Of the ones I use for socializing, I've only linked Facebook and Twitter to HootSuite. I imagine disaster is inevitable if I connect LinkedIn to anything I use in my personal life.

In general, I should probably use HootSuite more, especially for Facebook. When I first started using it, its bare-bones interface just didn't do it for me aesthetically. But nowadays, Facebook has gotten more and more cluttered with ads that I can pretty much ignore in HootSuite. Worse, its insistance on wanting to show me "top stories" is annoying as all get-out. Even when I switch to showing most recent stories first, it keeps asking me if I wouldn't really prefer top stories, and every few days it switches back to top stories on its own. HootSuite's default is chronological order. I may learn to love that bare-bones interface after all.

But merely reading Twitter and Facebook is standard. Social media management tools need to do more, and HootSuite does. I like that HootSuite lets you post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, although I don't use this feature all that much. This might be a more useful feature if I wanted to post the same stuff to three or more social networks, but it's not that much effort to post something in one network, and then copy and paste it to the other. And I don't often post the same things to Twitter and Facebook. There's some overlap between the two, of course, but not that much, and what I want to say to friends (Facebook) is rarely what I want to say to strangers (Twitter). But when I have used this feature, it's been easy to use.

Another selling point for me is that HootSuite has analytics. I love analytics: charts! graphs! trends! It's too bad that my social media life is so unexciting that the analytics don't show much, but the point is that they could. And it would be really neat to look at, I'm sure. I need to go do something interesting online so that I have cool analytics to admire.

HootSuite also lets you write status updates and tweets ahead of time and schedule them for later posting. I've probably used this feature more than any other. It's such a sensible feature that I keep being mildly surprised that neither Twitter nor Facebook has added it to their services. I haven't gotten the hang of AutoSchedule yet, but I'm in no rush—again, I probably don't have enough to say to justify its use.

I don't see myself using HootSuite professionally any time soon. I don't work with my library's social media, and we only have a Twitter account anyway. You don't need a social media management tool when you barely have any social media to manage. But it's been useful personally and I plan to keep using it for the foreseeable future.

The end of the beginning?

Good-bye Web 2.0, hello Social Media. This story from Mashable is about how the second term has now become more popular than the first, so Web 2.0 as a term is probably on its way out. Has Web 2.0 itself actually become established now? This blog was about exploring bits and pieces of it, and now I take many of those bits and pieces for granted. Cloud computing still falls apart at inconvenient times, but I'm relying on it to get through grad school. Not only could I find my new address through Google Maps, but it showed me the building itself at street level, where I could turn my focus around and see my neighbors. My heart and my book collection belong to Library Thing. Now that I finally have high-speed Internet, YouTube is no longer terra incognita.

But through all this, social media reigns. Just about everything I read on the Web offers me options for sharing with others, via Facebook, Twitter, or a dillion other sites. I've got an idea of what many of my friends did for the holidays because they posted to Facebook. The sites I shop from want me to be their fan on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. Welcome to the mainstreaming of social media.

Thing 46: WebJunction Minnesota

Well, here I am at WebJunction Minnesota. I'm not sure what to say about this site. Like LinkedIn, it's something that's purely professional for me . . . and like LinkedIn, I suspect that means I'm going to forget to visit it after a while. Social networking--or in this case, professional networking--is just more attractive when you've met the people you're networking with. With WJMN, I suspect the only people I know are the coworker and former coworker that I've gone through the 23 Things programs with, and by now, we're connected on all sorts of websites.

I like the idea of a site specifically for library networking, but I think WJMN needs some time to mature. I glanced over the classes. This is a good idea for letting people know what's available, and ditto for the calendar. However, the website itself could do with a redesign. Overall, the design seemed scattered and I found it difficult to focus on any one section. The Quick Links are "below the fold" and it took me multiple visits to the page before I saw them, and through them, finally found where the groups were listed. After all that, I did join a group: on Library 2.0, of course. I see that you can read group discussions without necessarily joining the group. I like this, as I have a tendency to lurk on groups, and this way, I won't be building up a long list of groups I joined because I found one discussion months ago to be interesting.

At this point, it's probably the courses that set WJMN apart from all the other networking sites out there. Discussions, contacts--those could be found on other sites, including LinkedIn and Ning. Perhaps as more people join WJMN, they'll expand their features, much as these other social networking sites have done.

in-between thing: friendfeed and lifestream.fm

Two days in, and I can tell you neither of them is perfect. FriendFeed can't see my Facebook status. Apparently this is some sort of glitch that affects people who tried to add Facebook to FriendFeed after the "new" Facebook was released. The app developers said back in May they were aware of this problem and are working on it; obviously they haven't solved it yet.

Less critical, but still annoying: despite my telling Lifestream.fm that I was in Minnesota, my posts are time-stamped for Central European Summer Time (seven hours ahead of Central Daylight Time), which affects what day they're credited to. Sigh. Lifestream.fm is based in Germany, I believe.

Thing 41: Mashup Your Life

I get why this Thing is called "Mashup Your Life." But for how I will end up using it, "Mashup Your Friends' Lives" would probably be a more accurate description.

I joined FriendFeed this afternoon. I'd chosen it because I knew at least one friend of mine was already there (so I'd have someone to connect to) and because my coworker who's doing the More Things program had joined Lifestream.fm and loathed it. But about an hour later, another 23 Things-er invited me to join Lifestream.fm, so I've ended up comparing the two. Based on a few hours familiarity, I think I like FriendFeed slightly better (I see why the More Things on a Stick program would like people to try these services for a few weeks, but this close to the deadline it ain't happening). It mostly has to do with aesthetics, and that I don't like Lifestream.fm's search engine for trying to find out if your friends are already on the site. But I'll have to play with both sites some more to see if that preference holds. I'm glad that both services let you make your account private. I will probably make my accounts public until the end of More Things on a Stick--that's only a few days, after all--and then go private and personalize my chosen service.

I see the two sites differ in their focus. FriendFeed puts your friends' avatars first, and the source of each post is almost an afterthought, in small gray print at the end. Lifestream.fm leaves your friends' avatars out altogether and leads with the icon of the post source (Twitter's little t, the RSS feed's orange square, etc.).

Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, these social networking site aggregators don't seem to be nearly as popular. I think these kinds of services could be really useful. I'm tired of tramping around from Facebook to LibraryThing to Google Reader to Twitter and so on, just trying to keep track of what all my friends are doing. Now the question is, are these sites just about to catch on, or are they doomed to never be quite noticed by the world at large?

By the way, if I invite my friends to join either of these services, am I being pushy? Maybe the last thing anyone wants is still yet another account on another service. Or am I just doing social networking the way it's supposed to go, trying to forge more connections? Does anyone know if Miss Manners has addressed this issue?

I managed to get both the FriendFeed and Lifestream.fm widgets into this blog, which is overkill, but I'll be taking one out sooner or later. Both are mostly made up of posts from this blog--it's oddly circular.

Thing 21: Beyond MySpace: Other Social Networks

Uh-oh. More of this here socializing with perfect strangers stuff. Eek!

In a way, Thing 20 was simple. Facebook or MySpace: choose one or the other (or both) and have at it, knowing you're tackling one (or both) of the largest social networking sites. With Thing 21, I feel like I'm overwhelmed by potential. Ning? WebJunction? Bake Space? The Wikipedia list left me feeling a bit lightheaded. My membership in Ravelry counts, right?

So I have dutifully joined the 23 Things on a Stick page on Ning, but like back in May when I first joined Ning for the Midwest Library Technology Conference, I can't think of anything to say (so much for socializing). I'm debating joining Bake Space--thank you for bringing it to my attention; even if I don't choose to play there, I know someone who should know about it. I'm not entirely sure how WebJunction works, so maybe it'll become clear if I join, and I dimly remember telling myself that I'd join LinkedIn when I got to Thing 21. But given what I said in the last post about not being all that interested in socializing unless I have a connection with people in the group, plus the fact that it's just going to take time to keep up with all these groups, I'm not sure how much use I'll make of any of these social networks.

Thing 20: Libraries and Social Networks

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.