Feeling unsocial about social networking!

This exercise immediately posed questions for further thought if not blogging! To be honest I had not really considered the variety of social networking sites and their different functionality. Thank you 23 things for making me aware of this. This exercise also made me challenge some of my prejudices and, pejorative ones at that, about Facebook. I had not even bothered to look at MySpace, or Bebo and I hadn't heard of Orkut. I have joined by invitation the LinkedIn pages of others so this exercise (13) and the following one (14) is both a challenge and a useful exploration of social networking.

From the Web 2.0 directory I linked to a number of libraries using Facebook pages. There are a variety of them, large institutional libraries and smaller faculty libraries and colleges too. This gave a good opportunity to see which libraries had used which functionality to what degree. Like everything in Oxford everybody does virtually (and literally virtually in this case!) much the same thing but in subtly different ways.

The best example of the useful of Facebook for this exercise I found to be the Education Library.
As well as providing genuine social network there was the appropriate amount of useful information clearly displayed. "The Wall provides for a genuine communication between readers with short sensible posting, comments and prompt and helpful replies. I felt that the wall used in this way promoted a sustained dialogue between reader and library, that probably does reflect, to a certain extent, the face to face conversation at the door. "The Info" tab was short and sweet providing the bare minimum but with links to more detailed information. I confess I think I would have liked to have seen more here. The "Info tab appears to be a good space for posting of genuine information: not gossip, not pictures and not ephemeral news. I find the "Boxes" tab a bit of misnomer but it seems to be used effectively by many libraries to provide links to external services with attractive logos and search boxes. I good way of collecting to together and promoting resources. The "Events" tab is useful for promoting events hosted by the library such as booksales and user-education sessions. It might also be useful for promoting other related events with caution. It clearly marks an event out as distinct piece of information about an individual one off event rather than mixing it up with general news where it might got lost. The "discussion" tab I thought would offer to engage people and promote a longer dialogue and space to talk about interesting things. Sadly, in the sites I looked at despite a thread being started there was little or no further engagement. I wonder how this might be used effectively to create a convivial conversation if not heated debate! The "links" tabs was useful for providing links. I wonder how this might relate to the use of "Delicious".
There is potentially for Facebook but there is a confusion between whether it genuinely "social" or "informational" or something inbetween; a good chimera or bad depending on content. It is difficult to see who takes "ownership" whether is reader or library or both to create a community and conversation. I found a certain circularity of information provision between Facebook, Blog, Twitter and Webpage. I suspect that as information sources we need to consider audience, content and functionality more coherently.