Thanks to a post by Nicole Engard, I have added the Facebook Blog Networks application to my Facebook page and registered ownership of Joeyanne Libraryanne.

Facebook Blog Networks is a way to display on your Facebook profile which blogs you own, author and read so that others can find interesting blogs. It also means that each blog registered on there has it’s own page where the feed is displayed (once you have enough fans!), and where readers have the opportunity to review and leave comments about the blog as you can see in the screenshot below (click for larger image, select All Sizes and then Original)

If you do add the application on Facebook (or already have it) please add my blog to the list of those you read. It would be nice to see if any Joeyanne Libraryanne readers are on Facebook.

For those of you who (like me) check Facebook on a daily basis, you probably noticed the new addition of the chat bar on the bottom of the screen yesterday.

I’d previously read blog posts about the Facebook chat feature and was looking forward to seeing what it would be like. Luckily I was able to have a play as a fellow Facebooker and librarian, Katharine Widdows was also online and wanting to give it a go. I have to say, I’m very pleasantly surprised. The instructions when you first log on are very clear, concise and easy to understand. By default, you are online as soon as you log on, but you can change this if you wish (I know some people found it disruptive). You can easily see who else is online by clicking on the Online Friends tab (see below), and start a conversation with them by clicking on their name.

At first I wasn’t aware when people had messaged me (I’m a terrible tab flicker and often leave tabs open even when I’m not using them). The chat bar does show when you have new messages and the tab header changes to say “New Message” so you can still tell if you’re on another tab but its not too disruptive if you leave it on unintentionally (no flashing pop ups or anything like that!). You can choose to open it in a separate window if you want to much like Meebo too, or add it to your sidebar in Firefox.

I think it’s great for quickly catching up with people and having short conversations. Katharine and I discussed how it could maybe be used as a library enquiry service, but this would only really work if users added the librarian as a personal friend, which many may wish not to do.

You can currently only have one to one conversations but I think Facebook may well continue to develop things like group conversations if it takes off. That sort of thing could be great for students doing group work (or staff working on a project) to discuss their progress or ideas.

I’m certainly impressed with Facebook’s initial developments into a chat tool, the main advantage being how quick and easy it is to use.

A common concern with regards to Facebook (certainly in my experience anyway) is the lack of privacy and the amount of information which is potentially available about you to anyone who wants it.

I’ve always worked on the philosophy that if I volunteer to put information about myself on the web then I must accept that anyone may view this information, but I know there are a lot of people who want to share their information with some people but want to be able to control who can see such information.

I was very pleased to see this on my Facebook homepage recently:

Now you can use friend lists to control exactly who can see what. We’ve also added the option to share information with “Friends of Friends”. For more details, check out the Privacy page.

Your Limited Profile is now a friend list on your Friends page. All of the same restrictions apply to the people on it.

Facebook has the option of allowing people to only view a limited profile and you can choose what sections of your profile are on that limited profile. It’s now even easier to control this on your friends list so that you can easily add people to the group you would like to only see you limited profile. You could decide for example that you don’t mind old school friends seeing what you are up to now but you don’t want them to know your personal contact details or allow them to see your photos.

I’m glad Facebook has responded to the negative concerns over privacy and I hope they continue to develop ways to make people feel more in control of their information. I know when I first proposed producing a Facebook page at work, some of my colleagues wanted to join to see what it was all about but they didn’t want to have their information on the internet for all to see and were put off joining for that reason. I’m hoping improvements to privacy settings will help overcome these issues and allow more people to feel confident in joining Facebook.

Of course, Facebook still holds any information you add so there will always be that concern but at least they are trying to allow you more control over what members of the public can see.

I’d heard of FriendFeed before today, but a Lifehacker post I read this morning encouraged me to give it a go.

If you haven’t heard of it before, FriendFeed is basically an aggregator of all your online social networks. It pulls together your updates from blogs, video services like YouTube, social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, picture sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa, wishlists like Amazon wishlist, etc etc! You can see in the screenshot the services is currently covers.

It only took a matter of minutes to register and add my feeds so I now have a nice aggregated feed that will give updates on all my different services.

I can imagine this sort of thing could be very useful for keeping up to date with what people are up to via just an RSS feed, although to be honest I don’t see myself using it very much. FriendFeed encourage you to find your friends on their website but to me that sort of defeats the object, I guess you would only have one website to visit then to see what friends are up to but you might as well add the feeds to your RSS reader (presuming you use RSS feeds).

Having said that, I’m having trouble adding my feed to my Bloglines account. It seems to work fine in Google Reader (I use this as a back-up reader), but Bloglines doesn’t recognise the feed.

Anyway, if you are interested in giving it a go please feel free to subscribe to my feed and let me know in the comments if you have a feed to share or any opinions about the service. I imagine more and more of these aggregators will be appearing to help people control their many online accounts so it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.

I have two reasons to make this post today:

• This morning I got the go ahead for my “Using Facebook Pages to reach our users” project at work
• The LASSIE project is coming to an end and the reports are available online

I’m really quite proud that my Facebook project is finally properly underway. Now that the Project Proposal has been OK’d with management I can really start progressing it. I have a meeting with my Project Sponsor on Monday morning when we can hopefully plan the way forward. The page is currently live (please feel free to have a look and let me know what you think, all feedback greatly received!) but has not yet been advertised. I’m hoping to improve the page, add new features, and encourage more of our users to join as fans so that we can send them updates about our services and events. I’m not expecting massive numbers of fans but if we can make contact with some students we previously wouldn’t have then I’ll be very happy.

Bizarrely, today was also the day that Jane Secker released the last case study (titled libraries and Facebook!) from the LASSIE project on libraries and social software. I read the early project documentation last year so am looking forward to reading the experiences of their case studies. I’m particularly interested in their reading list case study (as well as the Facebook one obviously!) as I would really like to see our reading lists managed more efficiently and am sure wikis or web services are one of the possible ways we could achieve this. I have 6 hours on the train tomorrow so I’ve printed them all out and am saving them for the train journey!

I’ve got a couple of interesting conferences coming up (one in Southampton tomorrow hence the long train journey!) which include discussions about social software so I’m hoping to share good practice and talk through ideas with other library colleagues there.

Firstly, a brief apology for the extended time period since the last post, I’ve been mega busy with work, study and preparing for Christmas (as well as spending a week in Scotland which was more of the relaxing than busy variety!). If you’re interested, I’ll be adding photos of our Scotland visit and a trip to London yesterday to my Flickr and Facebook accounts shortly.

Anyway, back to the purpose of this post. Since I first started investigating how we could utilise Facebook for our library users it’s had it’s fair share of issues and hoops to jump through, but it looks likely that we’ll be able to start using it soon. Our University Marketing department now have a corporate account on Facebook and they’ll hopefully be able to set a page up for our department to use as part of their account.

I’ve also been trying to establish exactly what we should use it for. My view is that it should be used as a marketing tool. I know that many of our students use Facebook on a regular basis, and I’m hoping we can promote our Facebook page to them so that they will join as fans. This way we can send them news updates (e.g. Christmas opening hours) and notify them of any events they may be interested in (e.g. our information skills workshops). I hope we can add links to useful sections of the library web pages which we all know are not used effectively at the moment by students (usually because they’re not aware of the material on there), and maybe even add a catalogue search box integrated in Facebook.

There are a few UK academic libraries appearing on Facebook Pages so I’m hoping we’ll be able to share advice and experiences, there is a group within Facebook called Libraries using Facebook Pages which I’ve found very useful to see what others are up to.

Is anyone else out there using Facebook Pages (for libraries or other organisations)?

Facebook have finally created a section for organisations to create a page - woohoo!

Groups have been possible on Facebook for quite a while, but from my experience these are not well used. You have to actively visit the page to see any updates, and in today’s age of RSS feeds and e-mail subscriptions this means that people very easily forget about them - I know I do!

Facebook Pages now allow organisations to create a page on Facebook and customise it (pretty much like an individual profile but you can have numerous administrators). People can then add themselves as “Fans” and you can send updates to all your fans at once.

I’ve expressed an interest in creating a page for our library department here but it now has to go through all the formalities of a project proposal, a sponsor, etc, etc. so it could take a while. It’s a shame really as I wanted to just have a go and see how it panned out, but I thought it best to check with people higher just in case.

I still think it is another excellent way to keep students up to date though and could be a great way to publicise events such as our workshops which anyone can turn up to. Just a quick wander through our IT Suite tells you that Facebook is very heavily used by a lot of our students, and I think we really need to be going to our users wherever they are, rather than waiting for them to come to us.

I’m hoping to take the project forward as I really think it could be a good way to reach students, I just hope we can pass it through the formalities fairly quickly as the actual page construction will only take a few minutes!

Has anyone else developed a new Facebook Page for their organisation?