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Internet Reviews: Social Networking Software Follow-up: Internet Reviews: Social Networking Software Follow-up:
Facebook and MySpace (and More) Facebook and MySpace (and More)
Stacey Greenwell
University of Kentucky
, [email protected].edu
Beth Kraemer
University of Kentucky
, kraemer@uky.edu
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Internet Reviews: Social Networking Software Follow-up: Facebook and MySpace Internet Reviews: Social Networking Software Follow-up: Facebook and MySpace
(and More) (and More)
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Kentucky Libraries
, v. 71, issue 4, p. 11-15.
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KENTUCKY LIBRARIES • VOLUME 71 • NUMBER 4
his article is a follow-up to the Internet
Reviews column which appeared in Kentucky
Libraries in the Fall 2006 issue (v 70 n 4, p 12-
16). As with all things internet, a lot has
changed in a short time. Both Facebook
(http://www.facebook.com) and MySpace
(http://www.myspace.com) have new features
with new implications for library use. We
think it is time for another look.
WHAT IS SOCIAL NETWORKING
SOFTWARE?
Social networking sites are still hot and get-
ting hotter. The primary purpose of these
applications is to allow people to connect.
Most sites require an individual to create
some kind of personal profile which is then
linked to others in a variety of ways. (See our
original article for the basics of social net-
working in Kentucky Libraries, vol. 70#4.)
MySpace and Facebook are two of the more
popular social networking sites, particularly
with the Net Generation, including current
high school and college students. The original
primary purpose of these sites was simple
social interaction: connecting with friends
and/or meeting new people. These services
have evolved beyond that original purpose to
have specific information-sharing uses that
have implications for libraries.
What started as a means to keep up with one’s
friends has become a tool for keeping up with
professional contacts or promoting one’s insti-
tution, business, or ideals. Whether using
social networking software for political cam-
paigns or for bringing a grieving campus
together, social networking software has
become an important way to build community
among its users. In this follow-up, we’ll
describe how these services have evolved in
this past year.
MySpace
(http://www.myspace.com)
MySpace is still one of the most popular sites
on the web. According to Alexa: The Web
Information Company, MySpace continues to
be the sixth most trafficked site in any lan-
guage worldwide (1). Usage is still primarily
by the Net Gen demographic and bands, but
usage is increasing in other groups as well.
MySpace profiles have been created for politi-
cians, authors promoting books, and movies.
Movies that are specifically teen-oriented may
use MySpace rather than a traditional
movie.com site as their primary web presence.
Since our Fall 2006 article, MySpace has
made available additional features to facilitate
social interaction and information sharing.
Some features seem to be a response to the
popularity of other sites such as Facebook.
Features that are popular in one service often
show up in others. New MySpace features
include:
1. Photo album support: MySpace images were
previously uploaded and accessed individu-
ally. The service now supports a Facebook-
style album system, allowing users to group
photos into albums which make manage-
ment of large photo collections much easier.
2. Status update: Users can use a quirky one-
liner to specify where they are or how they
are feeling at the moment. This may sound
familiar to Facebook users and users of
Twitter, a new utility that is much like a
micro-blog; Twitter users post brief messages
similar to instant messages or text posts
about their current status or activities.
3. MySpaceTV: This is MySpace’s answer to
YouTube. One can upload, view, rate and
comment on user-created videos.
4. Friend search: If the user is looking for a par-
ticular friend among the hundreds linked to
his/her profile, this new search utility is
very helpful. Until the search was imple-
INTERNET REVIEWS: SOCIAL NETWORKING SOFTWARE
FOLLOW-UP: FACEBOOK AND MYSPACE (AND MORE)
BY STACEY GREENWELL AND BETH KRAEMER
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY LIBRARIES
DEPARTMENT K ENTUCKY L IBRARY A SSOCIATION
11
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mented, users had to scroll through pages of
thumbnail images to find a specific person.
5. News: MySpace now includes a news aggre-
gator, a real-time news service that supports
user comments and ratings.
MySpace profiles can still be rather garish and
site accessibility is not a high-priority, but the
service has improved support, continues to
provide information on internet safety for
users, and has added features that attempt to
prevent “spam” friend requests.
At the University of Kentucky, the library’s
MySpace site has had limited success in terms
of reaching students, which was the initial
goal. There are 122 friends who have linked
to our profile. Most of those, however, seem to
be organizations (e.g., the UK Student
Activities board), businesses (e.g., local clubs
and shops), regional bands and authors, and
other libraries and librarians. The original
plan was not to aggressively seek friends but
rather to “build it and they would come.”
However, the friend requests that came unso-
licited were not UK students but the groups
mentioned above, as well as hoards of “unsa-
vory” or irrelevant profiles (e.g., romance
authors) that were rejected. With this strate-
gy, the library gained 87 friends during
approximately the first year of our profile.
As an experiment, it was decided to see what
response we would generate if the library did
send out friend requests to UK students. The
MySpace search utility was used to bring up
profiles of users who identified themselves as
current UK students. One-hundred four friend
requests were sent in one afternoon during
July. By the next morning we had 17 new
friends, for a response rate of about 16%. This
kind of promotion is somewhat tedious. Each
friend request needs to be sent out individual-
ly; we felt compelled to take a quick look at
the profile before “friending” them to guard
against anything beyond a normal level of
inappropriateness in the content.
Although it may be tedious, this kind of pro-
motion may be worth doing. We did not
receive any negative feedback from sending
the requests. Students are accustomed to
receiving friend requests from people they
don’t know. If they do not want to link to a
profile, they simply reject the request. If the
friend invitation is accepted, then their profile
will be linked to the library profile. Friends
will receive any bulletins the library sends out
(and vice versa), they can add comments to
the library profile site, and their friends may
see the library profile (which could potentially
result in more friend requests). The potential
for broadening the audience for library bul-
letins may make more aggressive solicitation
of friends beneficial. Libraries (particularly
public libraries) have used bulletins to pro-
mote events, classes and services. Creating a
MySpace profile is free to create, the system is
extremely popular, and the profiles do not
take a lot of time to maintain. As of
September 2007, the UK profile has been
viewed 1865 times. For our particular audi-
ence, the profile is not having a huge impact,
but for a zero-cost and a low-effort activity it
is worth continuing.
Facebook
(http://www.facebook.com
)
Since our initial article in Fall of 2006, several
significant things have happened with
Facebook. Most notably, it is now open to
everyone. Originally created by two students
as a social networking tool for Harvard stu-
dents in February 2004, the site was only open
to college students, then later high school stu-
dents and some large workplaces until
September 2006 when it opened to everyone.
Once Facbook allowed anyone to join, enor-
mous growth naturally resulted: from 12 mil-
lion active users in December 2006 to over 31
million active users today.
Though now wide open, Facebook became
restrictive in regard to who could create a pro-
file. In August 2006, there were over 100
libraries with active Facebook profiles. By the
end of September 2006, there were none.
Why? Creating a profile for someone other
than one’s self violates Facebook’s Terms of
Service. Perhaps Facebook wanted to avoid
becoming home to the thousands of “fakester”
profiles one finds on My Space-real or fake
profiles for celebrities, politicians, businesses,
bands, even inanimate objects like cans of
beer. Regardless, this interpretation of the
Terms of Service significantly hampered
librarians’ efforts to reach out to students via
Facebook. We attempted to reason with
Facebook that what the library was doing was
hardly “fakester” activity; for a complete
accounting, visit http://sla-divisions.typepad.
com/itbloggingsection/2006/09/librarys_
facebo.html.
Despite the issue with institutional profiles,
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libraries can create groups. Our experience
indicates the group has been considerably less
successful than the profile. Some disadvan-
tages of groups versus profiles that we have
observed are as follows:
It is more difficult to notice the library
group on a profile. When one was a “friend”
with the library, it was easier to notice when
we changed our profile picture, status, posted
a note or picture, etc. Groups are much more
hidden on the profile, usually buried some-
where between a hundred other groups one
has joined (from “UK Basketball Rocks My
World” to “Blanding Tower 15th Floor is the
Best!” to “Guys Who Love Peeing Outdoors”
to other things that aren’t fit to print here).
It is more difficult to get people to join a
group. With a profile, the library could
“friend” students or encourage students to
“friend” us. With groups, the group adminis-
trator (librarian) must already be friends with
a student before
requesting that student
join the group. This
severely limits how
many people can be
reached. The library’s
profile had over 50
friends after just a cou-
ple of months; after a
year, there are barely
50 group members. It is
possible for the librari-
an to “friend” students
and then encourage
them to join the group,
but becoming friends
with a librarian may
seem more threatening
to some students than
simply being friends
with the library as a
whole.
Many features are not available in groups.
With a profile, the library created a number of
photo albums. Pictures were taken of student
activities as well as pictures of interesting
things in the library. Photos of the student
organization banners hung in Young Library
proved to be a particular popular photoset.
With a group, we can post pictures but cannot
organize them.
While the groups feature for libraries has not
been very successful (at least not in our opin-
ion at UK), the Facebook Platform has been a
tremendous opportunity for libraries.
Launched in May 2007, the Facebook
Platform allows developers to create third-
party applications for Facebook users.
Applications cover a wide variety of purposes—
from the silly (use Zombies to bite your
friends or the Harry Potter application to cast
spells) to the more compelling (the many cat-
alog search applications or the Librarian
application which supports reference with a
real librarian).
One approach using Facebook is to talk to
students directly as a librarian, and this was
found to be fairly effective. For example, a
number of students created unofficial “Class of
2011” groups. Over the summer we quietly
monitored a few of the groups and answered
questions as they arose: “Where is the Cat’s
Path?” (a designated safe place to walk at UK)
“When is Fall Break?” “How do people address
mail to my dorm?” It is challenging to walk
the fine line between being helpful and
butting in on student conversations, but we
seemed to get no complaints when we offered
the occasional friendly advice to these fresh-
man groups.
Facebook advertising is some-
thing that many campus organi-
zations have done, and the UK
Libraries have taken out
Facebook ads on several occa-
sions. Most recently we ran an
ad for our freshman welcome
event “The Hubbub,” a pizza
and gaming party held in our
information commons. Though
the ads are fairly inexpensive
and they are seen by many stu-
dents it is difficult to evaluate
their effectiveness. The atten-
dance at “The Hubbub” was outstanding
(around 400 students, and we were competing
with rush activities) but it is unclear how
much of that was a result of the Facebook ads
since we advertised in multiple venues. For
more information about Facebook advertising:
http://utk.facebook.com/advertise.php
One surprising aspect of all this librarian
experimentation with Facebook is how it has
grown as a professional tool. We have often
felt that, if nothing else, librarians should
experiment with Facebook just to network
with other colleagues. It pleased us to see that
this sentiment is getting national attention
13
KENTUCKY LIBRARIES • VOLUME 71 • NUMBER 4
14
(see this Business Week article: http://www.
businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4
047050.htm)
Before Facebook was open to everyone, one of
the authors created a Facebook group for SLA
members (at the time, almost entirely aca-
demic librarians). Never expecting the group
to grow, we were delighted a year later to see
the group had grown to over 500 members.
Since then, hundreds of library-related groups
have sprung up on Facebook, including:
ALA
Kentucky Library People
First Year Experience Librarians
Library 2.0 Interest Group
No, I Don’t Look Like a Librarian!
In addition to the groups (which have some
problems in general—see above), librarians
are “friending” each other and keeping up via
messages and the wall. Upon returning from a
conference, we
routinely “friend”
people post-con-
ference rather than
file business cards.
With Facebook,
we often respond
to a colleague’s sta-
tus or recently
posted note. Yes,
we talk about
everything from
library 2.0 to shoes
to U.S. Open
Tennis, but what a
wonderful way of
keeping in touch
with colleagues
one would other-
wise only commu-
nicate with a few
times a year.
OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICES
MySpace and Facebook are not the only
social networking utilities used by libraries
and librarians. Some of the tools described
below are new and others are finding new use
by libraries.
Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/
).
Flickr’s primary purpose is photo-sharing.
Users can create a free account or can upgrade
for additional services, such as greater storage
capacity and more control over organizing
images. Libraries are using Flickr to create
photosets of library activities and events, as
yet another way to reach users. Flickr is pow-
erful and free or low-cost. A pro account pro-
viding unlimited photo uploading costs $25
per year.
Ning (http://www.ning.com/
).
Ning is a social networking tool that allows
users to create their own topic-based networks
and invite others to join the group. Members
of a given network can participate in threaded
discussions, upload images and video, and cre-
ate their own home page within the network.
There are several library-related networks cur-
rently within the Ning system.
LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/).
LinkedIn is marketed as a tool for profession-
als. The service provides typical social-net-
working options—create a profile and link it
to the profiles of others—with a more busi-
ness-oriented twist. Other users are called
“connections” rather than “friends.” The serv-
ice provides an option to recommend others
within your network and includes a section
for job experience. A number of librarians
have personal accounts in this service.
LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/).
LibraryThing allows users to catalog their own
book collections in a web-based shareable
database. The service supports tagging and
allows users to connect with others based on
common book interests.
del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/).
A “social bookmarking” service that allows
users to create web-based bookmarks, which
can be accessed from any computer via the
web. Bookmark collections are also shared
with other users as a discovery tool.
Encore (http://ukty-mt.iii.com/iii/encore/app
).
Think social networking is just for kids or
your more techie colleagues? Features of social
networking utilities have been showing up in
traditional tools for a while, including library
catalogs. The University of Kentucky is cur-
rently working with Innovative Interfaces,
Inc. to develop an overlay to the library cata-
log that is intended to provide a more intu-
itive search interface option for users. The sys-
tem supports a “tag cloud” relevancy feature
common in social networking applications
that support tagging. The system will support
user tagging so that in addition to library-
applied subject terms, we could soon see
patron-applied tags as a tool for improving
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15
search. Students could tag library resources as
useful for a specific class or project, helping
students in later semesters to discover those
resources.
SOCIAL NETWORKING SOFTWARE IS
EVERYWHERE
In a short time, social networking software is
becoming as ubiquitous as the phone or email.
A recent study released by the National
School Boards Association shows that 96% of
U.S. teens and tweens with online access use
some form of social networking software. And
it’s not just the kids—according to the
Business Week article mentioned above, 41%
of Facebook’s visitors are 35 and older. The
number of adults on MySpace is even higher.
The recent tragedy at Virginia Tech is an
indication of how ingrained social networking
is with the college-age generation. Several
news stories during the early hours of that day
noted survivor use of social networking tools,
especially Facebook. Students used Facebook
to get information about friends who had sur-
vived the massacre. A Facebook group for VT
survivors popped up within hours and was a
source of support as well as information. If one
joined the group, then obviously they were
OK. Where cell phones were busy and people
had trouble making direct one-to-one contact,
this was a way to “broadcast” one’s status to a
large number of people quickly.
This use of social networking sites indicates
how important such sites are to these kids.
Facebook is not just a tool. It’s ingrained in
their lives. There have been several news
reports over the past year about use of
Facebook and MySpace as a way for kids to
grieve for lost friends. A personal MySpace
site becomes like a guestbook at a memorial
service when a teen dies. The site stays up (at
least until or unless a parent wants to close it)
and friends post messages and share memories.
Organizations have begun to acknowledge the
importance of social networking sites to
millenials. Shortly after the Virginia Tech
shootings, NBC News created a Facebook
announcement to reach students willing to be
interviewed about the tragedy. They wanted
to interview students who knew the shooter,
and this was the fastest way for them to make
contact with the greatest number of students.
TRENDS
Social networking is a powerful force. The
influences extend beyond teen or young adult
librarianship. The trends seen in these tools
include:
The “personalization” of information
resources and services. Information used to be
dry and stuffy: “Just the facts, Jack.” The
author relating the information was explicitly
separated from the content. Professional affili-
ation and contact information were generally
the only personal details provided about the
author. Social networking tools have opened
the door to the personalization of information.
An important critique or service announce-
ment will appear next to photos of the author’s
cat or a description of a recent vacation. There
is a blending of personal and professional lives,
fueled by social networking. This can be an
uncomfortable transition for experienced pro-
fessionals, but it appears to be a strong trend.
The blending of tools, resources, formats,
services. Social networking applications
involve extending, blending, collaborating,
personalizing, sharing, and re-mixing (“mash-
ups”). Tools tend to be more modular or
include modular components of other services
and Facebook applications are one example of
this trend. Mash-ups are everywhere-take a
Google map of movie theaters or a list of
movie reviews from IMDB.
Evolution of existing tools to incorporate
elements of social networking. Elements of
social networking are everywhere. Amazon
supports tagging. CNN’s broadcast includes
user-submitted video. Even library catalogs are
evolving-Encore is just one example.
TAKE THE PLUNGE
Don’t let all the blinking, twirling cartoon-like
stuff fool you or frighten you off. At least keep
an eye on these trends and consider giving some
of these tools a try. You might find that it’s the
most fun you’ve had at work in a long time.
Stacey Greenwell
Beth Kraemer
WORKS CITED
Alexa. "Alexa Top 500." 1 November 2007. Accessed 1 November 2007. <http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500>
