Thing 9: More Facebook

More Facebook. For this "thing" I needed to join three groups. Well I'm cheating slightly because I've already join a few groups, but they are library related! :)

1. The London Library Staff Alumni (because I used to work at this fabulous library in London and I miss it so) The London Library

2. NextGen Librarians--I actually joined this because 23 Things and a blog I read, plus I know one of the admins, she's a fantastic librarian!

3. Stephen Fry Friendship by Proxy Group--because I sincerely adore Stephen Fry and he is such an advocate for libraries and is all around Awesome! And whenever I think about Stephen I have to watch my favorite QI clip (his tv show Quite Interesting).

I also am a fan of my library: University of Houston Libraries. As I mentioned in my earlier post about Facebook I'm not one for joining alumni groups, especially High School, there's a reason you move away from high school. The friends I have from HS days are the ones I want to keep. I've also discovered the Facebook can create quite a lot of bad feeling amongst "friends." Example: A friend of mine shares other mutual friends and has been reading their posts about getting together for lunch but they never include her. Result: feelings hurt.

Now I don't want to be completely negative about Facebook because I do think there is potential to reach out to library users, provide reference though social networks and market library services and events.

Thing 8

I succumbed to Facebook about a year ago after a friend of mine in England invited me. I have kept my list of "friends" pretty small, because basically I don't need or want to be friends with everyone I went to high school (there's a reason I moved away from my hometown) or everyone I went to college. As it may be very obvious, I am a very private person and revealing everything about my life through a social network is not natural for me. But it has been a great way to keep in touch with people from England and the friends I really want to keep in touch with. My brother has a Facebook account and he has over 800 friends, how is this possible? I also know people on Facebook who want to have as many "friends" as possible regardless of the connection. I have a few work colleagues who are my friends on Facebook, but I've also tried to keep this to a minimum because I worry about revealing what I consider personal (aka not-related or work appropriate) to my boss. I'm not on Facebook posting about my late night clubbing or how wasted I am, but I don't want or need that much togetherness.

After I joined I got my mom to join because it's the only way she can keep in touch with her granddaughter and my brother's family. They live on Facebook. They are obsessed with Twitter (Thing 12--should be interesting) but do I need to know that my sister-in-law is driving through town listening to music? Really??? As Hugh Laurie says: "As I look around my friends' tweets I see banality on all sides. I don't understand the purpose of it"--thank you, Bertie.

I can get very freaked out about privacy issues online and after reading the instructions on North Texas 23 Things Blog about not using your email account to find friends on Facebook (which is what I did!) I'm now wondering what freakish big brother information Facebook is compiling about me and the fact that I used the "Which Simpson character are you" application last week???