Week 3 a little late -- FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn

I went to the sites for all 3 of these and took their tours.

FaceBook has the equivalent of RSS features that will help me explain the process to my clients when I help them set up table of contents alerts. In fact, the other day I was sharing some of the information I am learning with a young administrator and she understood it because of that -- she is used to reading her FaceBook "News Feed" section -- it alerts her when a friend updates their site or "posts on her wall."

MySpace, "a place for friends," looks like a great place to find a date or mate -- if that were something I was interested in, which I am not.

Similarly, LinkedIn looks like a good site to start if I were looking for a job and wanting to organize my professional contacts and work on networking.

In doing this I realized a program both my universities set up is basically the same thing: inCircle at Baylor and at UT Austin. In fact, it may be a canned software they have purchased since both are called "inCircle." I did sign up for one of them and even set up a career group for librarians. However, very few have joined and there is no interaction.

I understand that once a person joins FaceBook or MySpace they often just check their account to keep up with friends rather than communicating via regular email.

I think that these would be great for a single person or job hunter wanting to make contacts, but personally I prefer using my listservs for professional contact. Possibly if all family members (including ones spouse) joined it would be a good way to share photos and activities, but right now I use email for that. I don't really want one more place I go to for personal interaction, and in fact, I do not think that spending a lot of time on this sort of account would be good for a marriage unless both were on it.

So, in summary, I don't think these sorts of sites will be very useful to me right now, but I am glad to know they exist.