As someone who speaks fairly regularly on social networking sites (MySpace & Facebook in particular), I’ve been struggling with the idea of whether to write library applications for these services. My short answer? No. At least not yet…
SNSes are by their very nature social- -people get on these sites to interact with other people that they know. Right now the only services I could push out would be our catalog and databases. Because they have no social interaction (users can’t share what they’re reading/researching), there’s no point in pushing the services into a social sphere. As Laurie Bridges points out, the services that actually get used are the ones with a high degree of social interactivity (no matter how silly they are…I’m looking at you Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Zombies vs. Werewolves people!).
I think it’s awesome that institutions are reaching out to their users by putting more of their services out on SNSes–this is user-centric service, to provide services where the users are. But I would rather wait until MPOW has a next-generation catalog and interactive databases that allow users to interact with data and each other. For now, I can spend my time on trying to get us that next-gen catalog, and interacting with students by being myself in Facebook!
