During Thing Eighteen I took a "detour" to start on Facebook, and found that it could be the most time-consuming of all if one lets it. I do not plan to spend as much time there as our students, but discovered why it is such an important means of communication for them. Many have hundreds of "friends" while I have 23 (a convenient number!)
The networking of friends is similar to Shelfari except that at Shelfari I am communicating with people I have never met while at Facebook with only people I know. When starting the Facebook account, I first put in Mischke and Gertner to locate some relatives. My sister had started a Mischke group prior to this summer's reunion. The first Mischke relative I found was a college student where I work. Being the Mischkes and Gertners are from Germany, I was not surprised to find many there, but also found that some live in Australia. One Mischke cousin I found is retired and recently wrote a family history, so not all of my friends are college students.
Now that my niece and nephews are Facebook friends, I realize that I can be reading information that their parents do not know. A cousin in Wisconsin recently gave birth, so it was fun to put in Ashley's name, and find that she already had posted photos of her new daughter on Facebook - (much easier than emailing photos to all of the relatives!).
Right after starting with Facebook, I read two articles in the August 22nd online editon of Chronicle of Higher Education talking about how colleges are using Facebook and MySpace. One use is to notify students with emergency alerts for crimes and floods. Some college officials are concerned that could lead to misleading rumors. In a post on The Wired Campus in the same edition, "Mike" commented that "no one under 30 takes Facebook all that seriously, and they certainly don't expect privacy & security. The entire site is a high tech freshman mixer - nothing more."
Besides the Mischkes of Minnesota, the other groups I joined are Libraries Using Facebook Pages and 23 Things on a Stick. After reading about the ELM and Research Project Calculator pages on Facebook in MINITEX Reference Notes, I became a fan for both. I put a link to a New York Times book review of Thomas Friedman's latest book on my Facebook page.
I like what Hennepin County Library does with a MySpace page, and will be interested to see if many academic libraries will have pages. Being all three librarians at our college participated in 23 Things, we can probably decide if we want to use any Facebook applications during this new school year. On Facebook I enjoyed finding several school librarians from the area. It will be fun to continue networking even when I finish 23 Things.
