Facebook

Another award-winning site, one for social networking, is Facebook. Here was my two cents worth from the econolibrarian blog and the text below, since the site may not be hosted on the server in a few days as they need to clear out old work clogging up server space before the start of the new semester.

I have many issues with Faceook. It certainly does not help that when I signed up for the 246 group, there were hardly any of us there. I could only search for my classmates in the community of the university, San Jose State, and in the community of Santa Cruz, where I said that I lived. So several of the people in this class were invisible to me until they posted something to the Blackboard group and then I was able to ask them to be my “friend.”

While I was waiting for someone else to join the 246 group, I read the Wikipedia entry on Facebook, and it raised some concerns, about Facebook’s lack of insuring privacy, that they do sell their users’ data (why do you think your account is free?), that Facebook has allowed for spying on students by university officials (who have .edu accounts), and that, like all other public online communities, employers and law enforcement have used someone’s Facebook page against them.

I liked communicating on Ning better than on Facebook, but then on Ning I had more than 3 people with whom to communicate. FaceBook provided thumbnail photos of many people I could invite to be my friend, based on the fact that they had a Facebook page and either a.)lived in Santa Cruz, or b.)attended or were alumni of San Jose State. These groups were large and fairly random.

FaceBook would be a good way to communicate for undergraduates (this was mostly who I was seeing) who all come in and get university email accounts and meet someone face-to-face, and then they hook up on Facebook with someone they have physically met, and then the network of that person’s virtual friends expands the first person’s social circle, etc.

I think that for academic librarians, an account would allow them to see what the students were thinking about. I suppose there were a few academic libraries grandfathered in with an institutional page and profile, before Facebook disallowed these and only allowed personal profiles. These libraries are able to advertise their services to a user group which will have many needs met by the institution. Individual librarians can still provide similar services on this social network provider.

In short, my reactions are probably more negative because I had hoped to like it better than MySpace, and so far I don’t, because I read the Wikipedia entry and thought about their concerns and thought of several others (my paranoid, police-state mind running amok, perhaps), and also because only a few of us had slisweb Squirrel mail accounts, and so the Ning community was so much larger and livelier than the 246 group on Facebook, but this goes back to the policies of Facebook, where you are initially only a part of the network at the institution (university, company, or high school) where you sign up– it’s like getting onto the intranet at an institution where only a tiny bit of that intranet concerns you, and you were hoping to access the internet.