The Social Networking Titans: Facebook and MySpace, the second installment of the column about social networking sites that I co-author with Debbie Ginsberg, has been published at LLRX:

With this article, librarians Deborah Ginsberg and Meg Kribble raise awareness about the different features provided by these services, and their respective impact on students, lawyers, public users, fellow professionals, and other patrons.

In addition, I was surprised to find our law library’s Facebook page featured on the cover and in the feature article of this month’s AALL Spectrum. The article by Jennifer Behrens is a great overview of the Pages feature on Facebook.

Note: I'm going to be a little lazy for this thing and the Twitter bonus thing, and simply re-post an abridged and slightly edited version of what I wrote a couple weeks ago to Teknoids, the techie legal education listserv, in response to a question about social networking.

Here's what I've been doing for myself and our library:

LinkedIn: If someone has given me their business card, they're either now in my network, or have received an invitation to join. I have a profile there based closely on my resume, and I look at other people's profiles when we connect. That's the extent of my use of it, because there isn't much more you can do, though it could be useful for job hunters. I like having a professional option that goes beyond basic contact information without getting into the "fluff" of favorite movies and cheese hating.

MySpace: I'm not a fan, but I occasionally use it and have reconnected with a couple old friends through it, so I can't completely hate it. Mainly, I dislike that most users' custom designs make it a shrine to bad web design. I also dislike that I have to regularly visit my friends' (often hard to read) pages to see what's new with them. I freely admit I'm too lazy for that. Which brings me to...

Facebook: my social network of choice, checked at least three times a day. Mostly, I keep up with the friends who are there, as well as my high school- and college-aged cousins. (I'd love to inform the latter group that when I was their age, if you wanted a personal web presence you had to hack out the HTML by hand...in the snow...uphill... both ways, but I digress.) I have professional contacts there too, but they're librarians I'm friendly with, and/or librarians I know online, often fellow bloggers with similar interests. I wouldn't indiscriminately add business contacts in FB, but like Jim, I assume if someone I know is already there or if we've talked about technology/2.0 "stuff", they might be interested in connecting there.

What I love about Facebook is that it gives you a news feed of your friends' activities, so you don't have to surf around to see what's new in their profiles/lives. Unfortunately, you can't subscribe to this, but you can subscribe to their short status statements via RSS. My biggest social networking wish is that Facebook would develop multiple, customizable contact levels for family, friends, and professional contacts so there's more control over what people see beyond the full/limited profile choices. I don't use the popular photo sharing feature of FB beyond a few select vacation photos--the resolution is too limited, and that's what Flickr is for.

Ning: I'm in a couple networks at ning, but I honestly check them so rarely it might as well be never. I love the concept, but it arrived after my networking/2.0/info overload point. In at least one of the networks, people seemed to be friend requesting every single person in the network, which seemed redundant. Like MySpace and Facebook groups, the Ning networks could benefit from RSS feeds.

Twitter: I was surprised to find myself a fan, but lately I've only been using it intermittently. It's basically an instant message/chat feed of the same group of librarians I know through Facebook, Second Life, and the biblioblogosphere, plus a few tech guru types.

As for institutional uses, the NSU Law Library has a MySpace page and a Facebook group. For both of them, I've basically set up a welcome message and list of quick links to our website for library hours, databases, recommended websites, etc. Then I repost items from our regular blog, Novalawcity, as MySpace blog entries and Facebook group posted links. My thinking is if the students are hanging around in one of those sites or use them as their browser homepage, it's one more place they could happen across the library and remember we're there when they need us. We did an internal announcement and have 8 MySpace friends and close to 30 Facebook group members. Neither is as many as I hoped for (we have at least 200 students listed on each site), but it's a start. None of the MySpace users subscribe to our MySpace blog, but it's getting a fair number of views.

The hurdle with truly communicating with students in Facebook is that the Facebook terms of service won't allow institutional profiles nor multiple individual accounts, and group updates never appear in news feeds, nor can they be subscribed to internally or externally. To really reach out to students, I'd have to be willing to friend them all so my updates show up in their Facebook news feeds, which I'm not willing to do with my personal profile. Some of the articles in the September Computers in Libraries covered this conundrum and other Facebook issues quite well.

Check it out at CNET:

A couple items of interest on web 2.0/social networking:

Social Networking Leaves Confines of the Computer
The New York Times reports on the migration of social networking services from PC to mobile devices.

Unlike the older networking sites, which are still largely used on PCs, these new phone-oriented services are bringing the burgeoning culture of exhibitionism to more exotic and more personal locations. They are also contributing to the general barrage of white noise and information overload — something that even some participants say they feel ambivalent about.

There's a big section later in the article about Twitter and what business model it may end up using, once the founders get beyond their present exclusive focus on growth, which is an interesting business plan in and of itself.

Hat tip to Stephen's Lighthouse for the tip off to This Is Going To Be BIG's Top Ten Reasons Why Web 2.0 Sucks. Sucks is too strong a term; the list would have been better named Top Ten Things Holding Web 2.0 Back. From content licensing issues to upper management (even of tech companies) not practicing what they preach to spelling and grammar to MySpace being the most popular social network, there are a lot of points I agree with, while still thinking there's a lot of value in 2.0. Pithy sum-up:

We could do great things if we weren't so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who've never even heard of Kool Aid.

Our university libraries are going to do the PLCMC Learning 2.0 program for librarians and staff this summer. I'm on the committee for it, and I'm excited about helping to share all the tools that are second nature to me, but still make a lot of family and friends go "huh?" when I mention them.

The Kool-Aid is meant to be shared.

Two interesting stories I've happened to hear this week:

Educators and librarians have been aware that students are often imprudent about what personal information they reveal in their social networking profiles, which can affect future employment. That same information--even just basic lists of friends--has also become a valuable research source for journalists looking for personal stories. Victims' Families Face Choice of Talking to the Media mentions that journalists covering the Virginia Tech massacre used students' FaceBook and MySpace profiles to find out the names, email addresses, and schools of students who were friends of the victims in order to contact them.

A College of William & Mary student who set up a FaceBook tribute to one of her friends noted, "people were snooping through it to try to get information, to try to talk to friends. And I just feel like it crosses a line, and maybe it doesn't break the law, but there's definitely been a new level to which the media will go."

For general guidelines on setting privacy levels on FaceBook, check out How to use FaceBook Without Losing Your Job Over It.

On a more enjoyable note, this week's episode of SoundClips, in which listeners talk about their favorite sounds in their daily lives, features North Carolina Judge Joe Craig talking about the varying cadences of three bailiffs in his court, whose chants open and close the court each week.