Thing #19 Social Networking

I love myspace! I have been using it now for about a year and a half. I also have a facebook account, although I do not use that as frequently. I like these sites, for myself, because they give me an opportunity to keep in touch with people that I would, otherwise, probably not. I no longer send regular emails to friends. I use one of these two websites. You can send short little catch ups without feeling bad for not sending a long, involved email. If something exciting happens, these sites allow you to let everybody know via blog or bulletin. It works the other way too. It gives you the chance to see whats going on in old friends' lives, etc. I know many people who use the sites for meeting new people. That aspect of it doesn't really appeal to me. I like the people I know now or the people I had forgotten that I had forgotten...the myspace stalkers actually spook me a bit. I also like the businesses, bands, authors that have pages. You get reminders or updates about only the things you added to your page. You don't get the blanket emails from different groups that you had once bought a ticket or book from. I think it would be a great idea for the library to generate a myspace page. Posting blogs and bulletins about special events is good marketing. Many people can be reached through their myspace pages that don't read the newspaper or see the flyers hanging in the elevator. I think its a great opportunity to reach more people. As I said before, I dont use facebook as much. I think it is geared toward a much younger crowd. It has a lot of really cool applications associated with it that just take up way too much time. These applications are geared toward meeting more people, etc, etc. All that said, I hate it for the kids having to grow up in a myspace society. I think there are a lot of social pressure and expectations involved with these networking sites, not to mention all the child predator safety issues that have been making the media lately.