Mostly for fun and curiosity, I set up a Facebook page for myself. Will you be my friend?
My collegian son uses Facebook extensively to communicate with friends on campus and at other universities. But he certainly is not allowing his mother to see his full profile and his message wall. This is understandable and is one of the reasons I wonder how Facebook can be an effective tool in serving our library clients. I’m certainly not alone in my musings. Melissa Mallon over at ACRLog is much younger than I and shares my concerns. Her post is amusingly entitled “Is Facebook this generation’s Rolling Stones?” in reference to the generation gap created between this digital generation and their parents’ generation. Here’s what she says about this generation, “They’re very secretive and protective of their niche, and they just don’t want the adults intruding.” And who can blame them?
That said, I am going to do some more experimenting with Facebook apps. This weekend over at the SLA Blogging Section blog, there is a useful post on Facebook Apps for Librarians. I want to explore some of these.
And my next question is how Facebook is being used as a communication tool among librarians? I use e-mail extensively and I’m not sure if I want to check even one more place for communications…
