LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Spring 2010)

... features an article by a certain Meredith Farkas on Twitter and FriendFeed:

http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/practice/dipping-stream

You guys might have seen my tweet already, but I just saw via their blog that the Library of Congress has acquired the entire Twitter archive (all PUBLIC tweets, not those from accounts marked private). I thought this quote from the post was particularly interesting in terms of what we talked about last week:

Just  today, a friend of mine showed me this website, TweetStats, where you put your Twitter username in (or anyone else's for that matter), and see a graphic and visual representation of your activity on Twitter over your current period of use. It shows you who you've retweeted (and how often), your average usage on different days of the week (my heaviest use so far seems to be on Wednesdays), as well as some other things.

I've been working on my next column for American Libraries magazine which is about using Twitter and FriendFeed as professional networking tools. For the online version of the article, I made a list of Twitter accounts librarians interested in technology might want to follow. I thought I'd share it with you in case you're interested in following some of these individuals:

From looking over the MySpace and Facebook library pages in the week 6 lecture, one thing is clear: any library that wants to have a presence on a Social Networking site must make a long-term commitment to maintaining the site.

You don't want a MySpace page with a blog that hasn't had a new entry since 2008 or a wall that's full of spam or links to your website that are broken. Better to have no site than to have a sad orphan site.

The following blog post critically looks at the recent adoption of Facebook and Twitter by the Santa Cruz Public Libraries system, in Santa Cruz County, California.

Santa Cruz Public Libraries

I've been browsing our assigned reading and thinking about how to use Twitter in libraries. What can we do with a quick and dirty real-time announcement format?

Some obvious things:

Send out a reminder of an event on the day of that event. Link to its calendar entry. Doesn't replace a calendar entry but complements it.

Tweet about events as they happen. Could result in more people showing up this time and even more likely will result in more interest in similar events in the future.

Less obvious but very useful:

I hadn't realized that I had signed up for Twitter nearly three years ago until I just went to my profile and kept clicking "more" at the bottom of the page. Since I have not been a prolific user of Twitter, I've been able to follow the ups and downs of my three different approaches.

I explained why I first loved Twitter to a friend actually via a tweet:

Before this week's assignment, I had a Twitter account but had never used it either to post or to follow anyone. I thought of Twitter as a technology that makes sense for people who do a lot of texting on their cellphones, a good way to post online from your cellphone but not something you'd bother using from a computer with proper keyboard and screen. I have a cellphone but it's not particularly good for texting, and, with our contract, texting seems like a waste of money.