Week# 18 - Social Networking

I tried a few social networking sites but after the first month, I was already bored with them. I never liked Myspace as I felt it was to YA immatureish. I get enough of that when playing online video games.

Facebook is the only site I still have an account with, though I really never get on it. My wife maintains it more than I do.

It was fun at first, and it is always nice to catch up with old high school and college friends, but my time is so limited as it is, keeping up with Facebook takes away from other stuff that I would rather be doing, (IE parenting, husband stuff, gaming). My wife is on Facebook all the time doing a fishing game or chatting with friends.

Sites like these are a great possibility for libraries, though. A few things need to be in place for is to succeed, though.

1. The library staff monitoring the branches Facebook page should do so without the fear of the "you slacking off" from their supervisors.

2. They need to devote enough time to keep it going and to monitor it.

3. Target it to the audience. Talking with adults on the branch page would turn off teens as they would not feel as comfortable. There would need to be separate pages for each age group.

I had a forum for the teens at Pasadena for a while and it was pretty popular with my regular teens.