Thing 18: Facebook and MySpace

I set up a facebook account about a month ago because I knew it was going to be one of our things. I didn’t really do anything with it until last week. I added some flair and found some friends (including someone I hadn’t talked to in a few years). I found facebook to be a little too into finding me friends by showing all these people from my college. There are a lot of students at UF, so I didn't know anyone they suggested. I also am not interested in friending (is that a word) people from my high school class, who I wasn’t friends with in high school. I did write something on a friend's wall but I don't know that I would use that a lot for communicating.

The group I joined is Librarians and Facebook. I am having a lot of trouble getting pages to load right now so I can't say much else about this group. It seems like it might be a good place to get ideas for using facebook in the library.

I have never had a page on MySpace, and I hope to never have a page on MySpace. A few years ago, the library I was at had a lot of trouble with MySpace and blocked it. From what I saw on the pages I looked at, it had everything the first internet pages had and a little more. By everything, I mean the pages were a visual nightmare. Extremely busy backgrounds and bizarre text color choices made the pages almost unreadable. The sound and video files make the pages very slow to load. There are probably some legible MySpace pages available but I think they are far out numbered by the poorly designed pages.