Okay, I have to be honest at this point and say that I'm not a huge fan of Facebook. It's not that I don't see its value, quite the contrary. When I've lost someone's email address, being able to find it again is terribly useful. It's also handy for keeping track of birthdays and seeing photographs and suchlike, but there's something about the small update window and the sheer volume of...stuff...that gets posted that puts me off Facebook. Not every platform suits everyone, and Facebook is definitely not for me.
On the other hand, I don't think that libraries can ignore the fact that Facebook is HUGELY popular (with people who aren't me), and having a presence can only be helpful. One of the things I do like about the Law Library's Facebook page is how much we can incorporate into one page. There's ways to search our catalogue as well as COPAC and WorldCat, and a widget showing our Delicious links. One of the best bits is that we can use a selective posting thingy to feed our Tweets into Facebook, which means one post puts updates in two places.
One concern I've seen coming up in lots of people's 23 Things blogs is how many different possibilities there are to 'network' using the internet. It's true that there are a plethora of options and that not everything will reach everybody. But I think that's always been true. There's never been a good way to reach everybody, and one of the joys of the internet is that we can connect all the scattered means of communication. We can link together our Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and LibraryThing accounts in each place, so it doesn't matter where people go, we're there.
That has to be a good thing, doesn't it?
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