Facebook's Learning Commons

Brian at the Ubiquitous Librarian was on to something when he compared Facebook's employee working environment to a learning commons environment. This recruitment video (as well as these images) show their collaborative, colorful, creative environment:




What do you think? Reminds me of today's academic library.

What Goes Around...

Back in fall 2006, my library's Facebook profile was one of the first to be shut down (profiles are for real people only, etc.). I wrote about this on a blog, including the transcript of some of my protests to Facebook to reconsider.

At that point, with my library profile removed by Facebook, I created a group for my library. Groups were kind of lame, so it was great when Facebook Pages came out in fall 2007. My library was one of the very first with a page.

Now in a post today from Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog, I see that Pages will basically no longer be Pages--they will have the same features as profiles:

Starting today, we are announcing new profiles for public figures and organizations. Once called Pages, these new profiles will now begin looking and functioning just like user profiles. Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already.

Gee Facebook, why didn't you just let me have the Facebook profile for my library back in 2006?

This is good news though--libraries will be able to be far more interactive with our users than we were with groups or with Pages. I've already updated UK Libraries status to "stop by and say hello!" For the Hub, "check out our basketball exhibit on the video windows." This could be very cool--stay tuned.

Facebook Listens to its Users

No doubt you've already heard this morning that Facebook has backed down on its new terms of service, largely as a result of user comments. I did find it interesting that Zuckerberg said today that "if Facebook were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world." A little more than a month ago, if Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated country in the world. Is Facebook really growing that fast? I know it seems that way to me at least--in the last few weeks I've gotten so many requests from grade school friends, high school friends, and even people that didn't like me at all. That's a weird phenomenon unto itself, but still, it's pretty evident that the Facebookiverse is growing at an impressive rate.

If Facebook were a country...

On the Facebook blog today, Mark Zuckerberg writes:

If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.

Facebook now has over 150 million users from every continent, including Antarctica. Almost half of those 150 million users log on every day. Wow. It seemed like more and more people I know have started Facebooking (and yes, I'm one of those who takes pride in having a profile long before it was popular, back in the days of academics only). Still, it's incredible to think of Facebook in terms of being larger than most countries. Read more on the Facebook blog.

Social Software in Libraries

The ARL Spec Kit, Social Software in Libraries, came out in July but I've just now had a moment to spend a little time with it. Beth and I answered the survey for the University of Kentucky. Imagine our delight to find that both the UK Second Life presence and our Blue 2.0 del.icio.us page were both chosen as examples in the report.

UK Libraries have been early adopters in many areas. To be good neighbors in a cubicle environment, many staff began using chat when the Young Library opened in 1998. Beth created a wiki for a conference way back in 2004. In the olden days of campus-only Facebook, we had one of the first Facebook profiles that got shut down. Then I created one of the first Facebook pages for a library. It's been cool to have the support to be able to experiment so much with social networking software.

As for the report, a few findings from my notes:

• 64 of 123 ARL member libraries completed the survey (tends to be such a small group, which is unfortunate)
  
• 95% of respondents indicate that they use social software in some fashion
• 94% provide user assistance via chat or IM
• 86% use wikis in some fashion
• 84% use RSS feeds to disseminate information to library users
• 82% blog
• 71% use widgets (example: Meebo)
• 70% participate in networking sites such as Facebook
• 62% share media on sites such as YouTube or Flickr
  
• 55% use tagging
• 80% of respondents reported they began using social software through a grassroots effort of individual librarians
• 92% said they use social software in hope that it will increase user awareness of library collections and services
• 60% hope to support faculty teaching and learning through use of social software

There's much, much more here. For more information, see the PDF Table of Contents and Executive Summary

Using Facebook to Promote Your Blog

A week or so ago, I installed the Blog Networks Facebook application and set up a page for this blog. The setup is pretty simple and relies somewhat on input from others. For example, I had to get ten people to confirm that I was the owner of this blog before I could be listed as the author. After I got fifteen fans, the page started pulling my blog's RSS feed. Once I get twenty fans, I'll start seeing statistics as to where my blog is most popular, etc. It's a neat little app, I suppose--just one more way to promote your blog. I like that I can use it to explore other blogs, particularly blogs that friends or "fans" write which might be new to me.

As a second way to promote my blog on Facebook, today I set up a Facebook Page for this blog. I have no idea how useful that might be, but I thought it would be interesting to compare the Blog Networks page and the Facebook Page. I'll watch for a few weeks and write up my observations.

Facebook Chat is Coming

I know it's becoming passé to report on Facebook-related news, but I had to share this. Of all places, I just heard the news from my favorite gossip blog, Gawker:

Facebook is launching FBChat in two weeks.

Sure I have too many chat IDs to keep track of now (OCS plus Gmail and AIM--at least I can run AIM thru Gmail now). And then there are all those chat accounts I rarely use. Thank goodness for tabbed browsing, huh. Anyway, Facebook chat will be just another convenient way to stay in touch with your peeps.

I Facebooked Your Mom

I love this campaign the University of Kentucky Law Library has started to advertise their Facebook Page to students. Thanks to my colleague, Sarah, for sharing!

Facebook Friend Lists

This may be old news already, but as I was catching up on some feeds, I learned that Facebook now allows you to organize your friends in lists.

For someone who has been on Facebook for a couple of years and has accumulated friends from a number of sources, this is a handy feature. My LinkedIn and MySpace contacts are pretty straightforward--my LinkedIn contacts are all business-related and MySpace friends are mostly old high school or college friends. But my Facebook friends run the gamut--some are students, others are SLA colleagues, several are co-workers, then there are a few college friends in there. Finally there are those people you meet at a conference and then friend on returning, rather than filing a business card in the rolodex. The new Friend List feature should help in organizing my Facebook contacts. An added bonus is that you can address a message to a Friend List, rather than typing in individual names (like an Outlook distribution list). So Facebook messaging my SLA friends or my co-workers will be a snap!

Writing about Facebook

I enjoy writing for my state association’s journal and have done so on several occasions. Like any print publication though, I find it frustrating that what I write is often out of date by the time it sees print.

In summer 2006, a colleague and I wrote one of the early articles about using Facebook and MySpace in libraries:

Greenwell, Stacey and Beth Kraemer. “Social Networking Software: Facebook and MySpace.” Kentucky Libraries. 2006. 70(4). 12-16.

The article provides an overview of both Facebook and MySpace and gives instructions and tips on creating a Facebook profile for your library. As many of you know, Facebook starting shutting down library profiles in fall 2006. We at least had time to publish an author’s note in the front of the article, but basically a good chunk of the article was out of date and not entirely useful.

That article was cited several times, and I became a little embarrassed at how outdated it had become. So in summer 2007 we thought: let's write a follow-up article that will be slightly more relevant. We wrote the second article in August 2007. This time we were more general but did cover creating a Facebook group for your library. We discussed the things we didn’t like about Facebook groups but also tips for creating a better group.

Now those of you who are following Facebook will know that Facebook launched Facebook Pages in October 2007. Facebook pages are the ideal home for a library presence—much better than the Facebook groups covered in our article. Unfortunately we weren't able to publish an author's note this time, so once again, we have an article out there that's brand new (my issue arrived on Monday) and already out of date:

Greenwell, Stacey and Beth Kraemer. “Update on Social Networking Software.” Kentucky Libraries. 2007. 71(4). 11-15.

I know it's inevitable when dealing with rapidly changing technology and that it's important to have those articles on my vita (and I certainly enjoy doing them) but I'm starting to wonder--what's the point? Who wants to create a Facebook Group for their library when they can now create a Facebook Page? How useful is this article actually going to be?

What’s interesting to me is that my first impulse was to post something to my blog. I immediately wanted to attempt to communicate with the person who might read the article and think: “why would they create a Facebook group? How silly when you can create a Facebook page now. These authors sure must not know much about Facebook.”

I’m thinking that if we do another article, we won’t focus on the mechanics of Facebook at all. What I’d really like to consider is the effectiveness of communicating in this fashion in the first place. With the new Facebook Pages, I am tickled that we have 46 fans and growing. However as I look through our fans, I see that they are mostly librarians. I have always said that Facebook is a great tool for keeping up with your librarian colleagues and discussing library issues. But how much is Facebook really helping us communicate with students? We touch on a few examples of reaching students with Facebook in our article (wall posts on student groups, ads for special events, etc.) but what will Facebook pages actually do for us?

Facebook Pages Update #3

As I suspected, Facebook is still fine-tuning the Pages feature. Today when you choose Edit Page, under Applications you can click on Browse More. This will bring up a list of applications that will work with the new Facebook Pages. Unfortunately the choices are still few--less than 300 in each category. Favorites like Meebo aren't there either (which by the way, is anyone else having trouble with Meebo via profile?). I suspect this is still a work-in-progress. In the meantime, you could offer Movie Quiz or Super Wall on your Page. Or the where's the closest Starbucks app--that might actually be useful for some libraries.

This morning's search of Facebook Pages yields 36 "library" and 6 "libraries." The few I looked at this morning are populated with librarian fans--relatively few users at this point. That's a concern I mentioned in an earlier post. It's still early though. We'll need to offer something compelling on our pages...what are your ideas?

More on Facebook Pages

In yesterday's post I wondered if Facebook Pages would be available via search. It seems that's true today. If you do a search in Facebook, Pages now shows up as a tab like People, Groups, Events, or Applications. I have noticed that it seems to be searching the page name only, so perhaps my naming us "University of Kentucky Libraries" wasn't too wise. Who's actually going to look for "Libraries"?

So I created an additional page today, loaded with keywords in the title, and more focused on the Hub: The Hub @ Young Library (UK Libraries). We'll keep them both updated as we did with our Facebook groups. I spend much less time on that than whipping through my email every morning.

Perhaps the search thing is something that will be modified down the road. I also wonder about Facebook apps and how they can be used with Facebook pages. Obviously this is still a work in progress for Facebook. Certainly they are going to make it easier for advertisers to reach users--we librarians just happen to be benefitting from this. As a Facebook user, I do wonder about these Social Ads and how in-your-face they may become. Like many Facebook users, I don't want it to become MySpace. Ugh.

I have created a Facebook group to discuss applications of Facebook pages further: Libraries Using Facebook Pages.

UPDATE

Facebook Pages are Here

The Facebook blog had some exciting news for us this morning. As you are likely aware, in Fall 2006 Facebook began shutting down library profiles. Their reasoning was that library profiles were "fake"--i.e., profiles can only represent individual people, not organizations or other entities.

This morning Facebook has launched a new advertising mechanism that will allow organizations and other entities Facebook pages which are:

distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook.

So cool--we can now build an official page for the library. When creating a page, one of the categories for the page is "Library/Public Building." I'm pleased that somebody at Facebook recognizes library interest in Facebook. The Facebook Page allows you to post your hours, as well as upload video, organize photos into albums (something sorely lacking in Facebook Groups), as well as take advantage of the wall, discussion board, events, and all the usual stuff. The cutesy thing is that friends of your page are "fans."

I'm excited at the prospect of creating a page for the library (in fact, I did so almost immediately). I realize the page may not have a great deal of impact (after all, how many students really look to Facebook when they've got a library question) but it was easy enough to create and it's always a good idea to spread the word about the library. I often describe our Facebook presence (we still have a couple of Facebook groups) as just another way to contact us. UK's Facebook profile which lived June-September 2006 yielded three chat reference questions plus several wall posts resulting in a conversation about library hours and some other general queries. For the minimal amount of effort it took to create and maintain our presence, I think it was definitely worth it.

I do wonder who will see our new Facebook Page. It's unlikely that I will buy an ad any time soon (we have bought ads for big events though it's difficult to assess how effective they are). Since I'm not advertising the Facebook Page, who will see it other than my friends who noticed it in my News Feed? Or colleagues who read about it on my blog or in the comments on Michael's blog? Facebook indicates that the pages will spread virally so I suppose the question is--how can I get the library page going virally? (Other than posting videos like this, of course.)

Will this just be another library entity on Facebook that is full of librarians and virtually no library users?

Time will tell, but I remain excited about this.

Update TWO

Update THREE