Social networking

For this week’s activities, I signed up with twitter and Ning. I quite like twitter, although its usefulness does rely on you having people to tweet at…..and something to say yourself! Once I’d started following Jenny, I looked for any other names I recognised – I take it it’s not something many other people opted to do?! Though it did lead to me getting the (slightly disconcerting) message that ‘DowningStreet is now following your updates on Twitter’, which led to thoughts of Big Brother. No, not that one, this one. Twitter strikes me as a useful way to communicate with users, particularly students – maybe a twitter feed of library headlines or something along those lines?

I’m on Facebook, but I’m not what you’d call an active user. In common with most people, I signed up because a couple of friends did. I use it mostly for messaging people whose email I’ve lost, and reading other people’s status updates, though I usually do that via RSS rather than the site itself. I’ve just started using pageflakes, so that might change.

Given that I’ve used Facebook, the Ning interface looked oddly familiar. I’ve had a play with some of the options on there, and can see that it might be useful to have all the tools available (blog, discussion, comments etc) in one place. I don’t think I’m likely to continue with it personally, as I don’t think I’m sociable enough for two social networking sites! I think it might be a better option for libraries to use though – you could build a network for a purpose, and it exists on its own. We could apply it to some of the teaching that we do, I think – use the blog and discussion features for follow up.