A post to Web4lib alerted me to this U Mich survey about libraries in social networks (blog post) that finds 77% of students don’t care for or want libraries in Facebook or MySpace.

the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool.

This isn’t bad news. It’s worth remembering that 23% of the respondents said they were at least a little interested in connecting with libraries in social networks. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore this opportunity to question the push to put libraries into those spaces. And the first thing to ask is if we understand them.

I doubt the patrons of an average bar would welcome libraries if we tried to set up shop there, and not just because we’d get nitpicky about the weekly trivia games. Bars and libraries are both social spaces, but that doesn’t make them equivalent spaces. Whether libraries belong in Facebook anymore than they belong in my local bar is still an open question in my mind (one major factor is that FB is working to make itself a social applications platform, something that should have all of us paying attention).

That doesn’t mean Facebook and other social applications don’t matter. Quite to the contrary, so let me say it again: Social Applications Still Matter To Libraries.

One giant lesson we can take from the entire history of the internet is that social matters. There have been blips and bubbles where we lost sight of it, but the internet spread because of social applications like email and chat. And more than Ajax and rounded corners, web 2.0 has been all about Social. And now we find it everywhere. Flickr defines itself as a photo sharing site, but it only works because of the social features there. And though Facebook allows image sharing, the different purposes of the two sites are clear to all who use them.

It is essential that we build social features into our libraries. Comments, easy linkability (short, sensical URLs), and findability in search engines are must haves in our systems. But that isn’t enough. We also need outstanding librarians to breath life into them. Librarians who can speak in a post-Cluetrain voice, and be accepted and respected in Facebook, Second Life, and in the comment threads in our own libraries.

Corporate networks are defenseless against the growing threat from instant messaging, and the government warns WiFi is insecure and easily sniffed.

Experts suggest we take precautions against the growing risk of p2p software that’s exposing sensitive documents and threatening national security.

Businesses blame security problems on their employees, their mobile devices, and other consumer technologies.

And now we have MySpace.

NPR : Back to School: Reading, Writing and Internet Safety

As students return to school in Virginia, there’s something new in their curriculum. Virginia is the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety.

MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed.

myspace, second life, twitter, social software

Lichen, who’s had a great string of posts lately, pointed out Amy Campbell’s website, which opens with the following:

So I guess this myspace thing is going to catch on.

I resisted for a long time. These things make me nervous – myspace, messenger, emoticons… I can’t help but see it as some sinister forerunner of the complete degredation of language and of human interaction. I’m worried about a generation of people who’s definition of “friendship” consists first and foremost of an anonymous exchange of links.

Maybe it’s the way that words lose their meaning that scares me… “friend”, “buddy”, “comment” … These things used to require effort, investment, thought and emotional risk. At first I was sending a personal note, intoducing myself, with each “friend request” I made to an artist I admire. But within a week I came to realize that myspace culture doesn’t even require this… “add”, “approve”, “deny” … that’s all there is to it. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice keeps chiming “Approval and the approve button are not the same thing”….

But let’s be honest, what scares me the most is how easily I’m getting sucked in. “Friend requests” inflate my ego… Pending requests hurt my feelings … Just a little, but enough to make me worry. The amount of time I spend (and could, if I let myself) fiddling around with this thing is truly alarming.

I want my music to be delivered by hand, to people in a room, whose faces I can see. I want to make contact using all my senses… And while I realize that the improved communication methods of the electronic age needn’t threaten that, I’m afraid of the day when we can’t muster the motivation to go out and make and hear music in real life.

It’s the search for deeper meaning I feel becoming obscured. And it troubles me that my first instinct in the search for deeper meaning is to google it.

That said, I’m still hoping you’re going to click the link above and give me some approval.

see you out there,
Amy Campbell

Amy Campbell, community, inclusion, myspace, seduction, social software

I just got a heads up on an Advertising Age story that Wal-Mart is trying to be MySpace (and, yeah, I aped their headline, too).

Here’s the lead:

It’s a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to “express their individuality,” yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users “hubsters” — a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool.

Sure, nobody went broke underestimating American taste, but underestimating our children’s ability to spot a fake?

update: here’s some sharp criticism. I like it.

AdAge, fake, Hubsters, knock-off, MySpace, MySpace.com, The Hub, Wal-Mart

Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.

These are the stories we’ve come to expect: teen does or post the results of something [stupid|illegal|dangerous] in [MySpace|Facebook|some other online place] and gets caught. The point here is that the (meatspace) community’s existing means of enforcement worked, and perhaps worked better, in these new electronic forums.

Our youth’s new Wild West may have instead turned out to be an Orwellian nightmare that no kid can escape from.

It’s bad enough, anyway, that Nate Anderson had to give some advice to the young’ns:

What can you do to keep yourself out the crosshairs? The obvious first step is to internalize the idea that no section of the Internet is your private playground, and to keep your mouth shut in public forums about information you would rather the rest of the world did not know. Beyond that, though, it can be difficult to eliminate traces of stupidity online. Good luck getting Google to remove all links to that embarrassing office karaoke video that comes up first when you search your name. It ain’t gonna happen. The moral of the story is: don’t expect privacy on the Internet and you won’t be disappointed.

embarrassing, facebook, moral responsibility, myspace, online policing, playground, privacy, public forums, social internet, social software, youth

Danah Boyd posted recently at Many-to-Many about the future of social software. I’ve been more than a little bit gung ho on web 2.0 for a while, but I do like her caution:

If MySpace falters in the next 1-2 years, it will be because of this moral panic. Before all of you competitors get motivated to exacerbate the moral panic, think again. If the moral panic succeeds:

• Youth will lose (even more) freedom of speech. How far will the curtailment of the First Amendment go?
   
• All users will lose the safety and opportunities of pseudonymity, particularly around political speech and particularly internationally.
   
• Internet companies will be required to confirm the real life identity of all users. At their own cost.
   
• International growth on social communities will be massively curtailed because it is much harder to confirm non-US populations.
   
• Internet companies will lose the protections of common carrier which will have ramifications in all sorts of directions.
   
• Internet companies will see a massive increase in subpoenas and will be forced to turn over data on their users which will in turn destroy the trust relationship between companies and users.
   
• There will be a much greater barrier for new communities to form and for startups to build out new social environments.
   
• International companies will be far better positioned to create new social technologies because they won’t have to abide by American laws even if American citizens use their technology (assuming the servers are hosted outside of the US). Unless, of course, we decide to block sites on a nation-wide basis…

There’s stuff here that I wish I had more time to write about, more time to think about, but read the full story. I’ll get back to this in bits and pieces over time.

danah boyd, facebook, friendster, moral responsibility, myspace, responsible application development, responsible web design, social internet, social software, web 2.0

Lichen pointed me to this Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette post about new technologies:

Keep up to date with new technologies that you can co-opt for library use. So what if no one will ever listen to the pod casts of your bibliographic instruction lectures, subscribe to the RSS feeds from your library’s blog, send your reference librarian instant messages, or view your library’s profile on facebook.com? At least you did your part to make all these cool technologies a little bit lamer.

Point taken, and it’s a reasonable caution. The same rush to embrace trends that has us putting coffee shops in our libraries might also push us into trying to setup shop in online forums like Facebook, but who’s to say we should go there? After all, people have been gathering in bars for years, but the we don’t see branches opening in Cheers or libraries offering Irish coffee in their new coffee shops.

But there is something to learn from these new technologies. I just saw numbers that suggested Facebook (an optional service) gets about the same usage by our students as our university portal (which students are required to use, even to check email). Match that with the growing number of stories I’ve been hearing of students using Facebook to collaborate on class projects, and we have to conclude that something interesting is happening.

I’m going to avoid the question of whether libraries should be trying to offer services inside Facebook, and instead ask the question of how well our existing services work for those using Facebook. If students are collaborating, they’re likely sharing URLs, but our OPACs and databases often aren’t bookmarkable, making it difficult to exchange links to those resources (and instructions like these don’t help either). And if somebody blogs about one of our items, our catalogs don’t support comments or trackbacks, making it a one-sided conversation. Facebook and other online services are important to our patrons, and we would do well to think about how information is exchanged using those technologies. We would do well to build services that interoperate with the internet that people are using.

social software, social internet, internet and society, internet and academia, facebook, myspace, library, libraries, future libraries, information behavior, durable links, academia