Friend Networks

For this assignment, I explored Facebook and LinkedIn. Following Jim's suggestions, I decided to see if a classmate of mine was on Facebook, and he was! We went to school together for grades 1-8. He later went on to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard and is teaching at the University of Chicago. I decided not to request to be his friend. We haven't been in touch since 8th grade. But I did show his profile to another classmate of mine with whom I've stayed in touch. Her college-age daughter was also there, and of course the daughter has a profile on Facebook. She looked at our classmate's picture and said, "He only has five friends! I have more than 130!" Of course, he probably doesn't devote as much time and effort into developing his Facebook profile as she does--he may have more professorial things to do. But it gave me an interesting insight. Facebook and other similar sites provide quantifiable measures of popularity and fame. When I checked this afternoon on Facebook, Barack Obama had more than 1, 314,000 supporters, and John McCain had more than 199,250. It reminded me of "Extras" by Scott Westerfeld. By the way, I sent my friend's daughter a message asking to be her Facebook friend. That may be all the Facebook friends I have.

One of the Facebook features I like is that when I put in the names of schools I attended, it gave me a list of other people on Facebook who attended those schools and offered me the chance to be their friends. I tried it for UNC Chapel Hill, where I went to library school. If I have some extra time, I'll try it for the college I attended too.

I also looked at LinkedIn and initially planned to complete a profile there for this project. I had heard good things about it from people at the Special Libraries Association conference here in Seattle in June. But I decided that doing their profile requires more time and effort than I should spend here at work, so I'll save that for later. I looked at Library Thing and told some of my favorite bibliophiles about it. And soon after all my 20 for 2.0 assignments are done, I'll remove my profile from Facebook. But I'm glad to have had this chance to explore this very popular part of the Internet.