It's been a very interesting couple of weeks to watch librarians and social networks. Some observations.

• I first started wondering what was going on last month when out of nowhere came a surge of librarians on Linked In, a more professionally-oriented social network that has been around for several years. I had two accounts on the site from a couple of years ago, neither of which I'd done much with, but they both started getting friend requests at a surprising rate. I'd love to know what started the friending frenzy - I think I missed someone blogging about it, but my theory is that in the same week, Michael Porter and Ed Vielmetti both gave presentations that included the site and things took off from there.

  It seems to have died down a little now, and I haven't been back in the site lately to do anything more than consolidate the two accounts, update my profile, and accept invitations. The site is great for networking but lacks the social tools some of the more viral networks have. It will be interesting to see if much else happens there, other than just learning about degrees of separation and who knows whom. Then again, I'm more of a fun network user, rather than a business one.
   



• At the other extreme, librarians on Facebook are having a lot of fun. I love my Facebook news feed (even though it's held hostage in the site instead of in my aggregator) and it's what keeps me coming back to the site (so I guess their strategy is working). I enjoy the groups - although I enjoy finding groups with funny names even more - but it's that constant update of what my friends and friendsters are doing that is pure crack.

  What's really great is to watch what happens when one person finds a good group and joins it. All of a sudden a bunch of us see that they've done this and then we flock to it. It's not a new phenomenon online (even in the physical world), but it nicely highlights the power of these tools. My favorite group name is still "when I was your age, Pluto was a planet." Oh, to make libraries this viral and Gladwellian-tipped.
   



• A couple of weeks ago, Bill Drew started the Library 2.0 network on a build-your-own-social-network-for-free site called Ning. There's a fascinating article to be had in how quickly it has grown and how (more than 300 members in just two weeks). There were times when you knew a link to the site had been posted or passed around because suddenly you got several friend requests within an hour or two.

  There are some discussions happening on the site that aren't occurring elsewhere or are not as visible, so I highly recommend joining if you are at all interested in Library 2.0. Nice job, Bill!
   



• I first played with Twitter in December when Ed Vielmetti showed it to me at the National Library Agenda. He was using it to post where he was, what he was doing, and/or what he was thinking about at the time. I created an account (http://twitter.com/shiftedlibrarian) and used it for a few days (it helps to have unlimited texting on your cell phone) but then fell out of the habit. Since then, I've noticed a lot more folks embedding their Twitter status on their websites, and I've thought about it adding it to mine.

  I'm not sure how comfortable I am being completely open about my location or status, although I have started to be more open about that to friends on Facebook. In my presentations, I've sometimes noted how Ed uses Plazes on his blog to automatically show where he is (based on where he is using WiFi), because that's a very different way of "putting yourself out there," and I'm still figuring out how comfortable I would be doing something like that. I think a lot of younger folks are like Ed and are growing up that way, which has implications for future library services.

  Then along comes Twitter, which is like status on steroids and it further breaks down those privacy barriers for some people, making these kinds of instant gratification updates a little more okay. David Lee King and Steven Cohen have both discovered the site recently, so I'll be interested to see if they keep up with it more than I have. I still may go back to posting ideas and tasks to my Twitter account, as I did find that valuable and that is the first rule of a social site - give the user added value.

The moral of the story: I think a good number of librarians are playing with, understanding, and adopting social networks online at a time when we need to be doing this in order to fight attempts to ban these very sites from being accessed in our buildings. I also see an awful lot of people having fun, usually accompanied by some learning, which can only be good.