FACEBOOK/SPACEBOOK

A few weeks ago I actually signed up for facebook and finished a page for myself in the social networking world at the urging of my dear "twenty-something" daughter who has been connecting with relatives near and wide and making new friends there. I managed to make my own page and all of a sudden I was inundated with tons of boring updates from people who were friends of friends I didn't know and didn't want to know. I know that it sounds callous, but I had better ways to use my time than sift through tons of updates that made no sense to me because I didn't personally know these people. It took me awhile to figure it out and I finally deleted my page. Now it won't let me back in because it remembers my email but has disabled the password.
I did enjoy looking at the Rapid City Library's efforts and thought that it would be a nice way to get people to network with the reviewing of books that they had read. Very cool. But, as I've said before, we have two kinds of patrons...computer gamers and book readers. The gamers are not interested in books and the book readers are not spending time on the computers, even at home, because they are busy reading!
I also spent some time looking at the ALA site and that was interesting to read.
One thing that concerned me was the possibility of weird stuff showing up from people accessing the site and putting questionable material on it. I suppose that could be controlled by the administrator of the page, but that also would be time consuming and for a library staffed by a single person on most days, it's enough to visit with the patrons and get reference questions solved!
I can see that it would be a creative way to involve teens in a larger city and invite patrons to events and advertise, but, as I've said before, in a small town, there are better ways to do this than the internet.