Last week I noted that of all of the social media sites, I’m prob­a­bly most engaged with Face­book right now. Twit­ter tends to frag­ment my atten­tion too much, so I started restrict­ing my time on it to about an hour a day. The con­ver­sa­tion there is too dis­jointed for me, and it’s impos­si­ble to find and refer back to all the pieces of a con­ver­sa­tion even just a few days later. The best I’ve been able to man­age is to use Tweet­Deck to cre­ate groups to check in on peri­od­i­cally, as opposed to try­ing to keep up with every­one all the time. I still don’t let myself sit on Twit­ter for too long because as Ed Viel­metti says, “If you keep refresh­ing it will never, ever stop..” In fact, my rule of thumb on any social site is that I never hit the “older” button.

Then Friend­Feed came along, which helped unify con­ver­sa­tions and brought pic­tures, audio, and video into the mix. The breadth of ser­vices it aggre­gates is pretty impres­sive, so when a crit­i­cal mass of friends hit there, I switched my hour a day to check in there.

Let me pref­ace this next state­ment by say­ing that I love the serendip­ity of Friend­Feed, and it def­i­nitely restores fun to aggre­ga­tion. That said, it moves way too fast for me. As a result, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that Friend­Feed is Twit­ter on speed, while Face­book is Twit­ter on Ritalin, and for where I’m at right now, Face­book is my pri­mary drug of choice. I need some­thing to help me con­trol the fire­hose so that I can more eas­ily focus on spe­cific pieces, and the fact that I can sep­a­rate the links and posts from the sta­tus updates on FB does exactly that. I have the sta­tus of about three dozen folks texted to my phone, which means I see what I con­sider to be the most impor­tant func­tion of the site for me front and center.

I had been friend­ing peo­ple there for a while, watched what libraries were doing, and gone through the “play with var­i­ous appli­ca­tions” stage of Face­book love, but then I found myself using it less and less. I fell back in love with it, though, when they added the abil­ity to com­ment on a friend’s sta­tus, because that’s the piece I was hav­ing trou­ble track­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in amongst all of the con­ver­sa­tions tak­ing place on Twit­ter. Even bet­ter was a change in the way SMS responses are han­dled so that replies from my phone now appear as com­ments on sta­tuses, not inbox mes­sages attached to pre­vi­ous emails. That means there’s con­ver­sa­tion around updates, and it’s at a man­age­able pace.

I still check Friend­Feed a cou­ple of times a day, but I’m swamped with enough stuff right now that I use my social net­works first and fore­most for friend updates, and Face­book turns out to be per­fect for that, espe­cially for my non-library friends. I can lit­er­ally see oth­ers get­ting a lot out of Twit­ter and Friend­Feed because they mon­i­tor those sites a lot more closely, and more power to them. There are a lot of con­ver­sa­tions right now about the ROI of blog­ging ver­sus Twit­ter ver­sus Friend­Feed, but it’s impor­tant to exam­ine what you want to get from these tools in order to eval­u­ate which one(s) are best for you at any given time, remem­ber­ing that it’s all cycli­cal and is likely to change just when you get com­fort­able with your rou­tine. Of course, that can be a good thing.

Over on Museum 2.0, Nina Simon (not Nina Simone — and wouldn’t it be some­thing if this post was sung by her) has a *great* blog post encour­ag­ing muse­ums to get human on their Twit­ter accounts and pro­vide more than just “spammy and dull” tweets. Pretty much every­thing she exhorts muse­ums to do applies to libraries, as well. Actu­ally, it’s great advice for all types of orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing, um, asso­ci­a­tions and the like.

She pro­vides seven broad sug­ges­tions, but here are some spe­cific ideas she pro­poses for “museum Twit­ter ‘radio sta­tions’.” Just think “libraries” instead of “muse­ums” to imag­ine what a great stream your library could offer.

An Open Let­ter to Muse­ums on Twitter

• “Funny things said by visitors.
• Guard feed! (Thanks for the idea, Shelley.)
• Insti­tu­tional super­sti­tions or weird things about the building.
• The imag­ined expe­ri­ences of a famous arti­fact, heav­ily loved inter­ac­tive, or other insti­tu­tional mas­cot (see this Twit­ter feed, which I doubt is writ­ten by AMNH staff).
• Haiku about museum work.
• A daily or weekly fea­ture on a spe­cific topic.
• Jokes, recipes, quotes, and inter­est­ing facts. Do you know why there are naked ladies on the front of ships?
• Weird and sur­pris­ing behind-the-scenes vic­to­ries and chal­lenges. What’s it like to prep an exhi­bi­tion on poop?
• Top­i­cal, provoca­tive questions.”

Do you know of any libraries already doing this type of tweet­ing? There are some good exam­ples listed on the very help­ful Twit­ter­ing Libraries sec­tion of the LIS 5313 wiki, but I need to go through the whole list.

I’m also inter­ested in find­ing asso­ci­a­tions doing this well (I’m plan­ning to go through Lindy Dreyer’s list of asso­ci­a­tions on Twit­ter).

As 2008 comes to a close (where on earth did it go?), I want to take a moment to reflect on this past year.

When I think about every­thing I was lucky enough to do this this year, what stands out the most are the peo­ple I met dur­ing my trav­els, both online and offline. The best thing about social net­work sites is the social part, and this year my net­work expanded to include new friends and redis­cov­ered old ones. In fact, that’s def­i­nitely been one of my high­lights for the year — recon­nect­ing with folks from my pre-online life, which to me is an indi­ca­tor that online net­works are def­i­nitely going main­stream. I’m see­ing so many more non-techie friends there, and I really appre­ci­ate being able to con­nect with them in this way. I still don’t have a lot of time to spend on Twit­ter or Friend­Feed, but I’ve gone back to Face­book more and more because that’s where I’m find­ing a lot of these folks. Plus, it runs at a speed that works well for me right now (some­thing I’m going to write more about it in an upcom­ing post).

This was espe­cially true this year when I had so many projects going on at work. I haven’t writ­ten about my job at ALA here very much, mainly because I’ve been too busy to blog much at all. How­ever, this was such a pro­duc­tive and pro­gres­sive year at my job that I want to high­light a few of the things we accom­plished. While this is by no means an exhaus­tive list (and it’s cer­tainly not reflec­tive of the work done across the orga­ni­za­tion as a whole), these are just a few of the things that were per­son­ally grat­i­fy­ing for me in 2008, because I played a role in help­ing them hap­pen. In chrono­log­i­cal order:

• Gam­ing in libraries
  The year started out big for us when we learned about the $1 mil­lion grant from the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion. It’s allowed us to move this topic for­ward very quickly, and soon we’ll start post­ing the tan­gi­ble out­comes. Watch for more to come from this grant in 2009, which will help build on our gen­eral suc­cesses around gam­ing so far. In 2008, we launched the Games and Gam­ing Mem­ber Ini­tia­tive Group, ran a big game at our Annual Con­fer­ence, started a new Games in Libraries pod­cast, held a sec­ond suc­cess­ful Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium, and coör­di­nated the first annual National Gam­ing Day @ your library. All in all, a very good year for gam­ing in libraries.
• In April, Library Tech­nol­ogy Reports pub­lished Gam­ing and Libraries: Broad­en­ing the Inter­sec­tions, my sec­ond issue ded­i­cated to the topic.
• AL Focus launched an incred­i­bly pop­u­lar series of videos for National Library Week. Full credit for these bril­liant pieces goes to Dan Kraus.
• In August, we launched the READ mini-poster gen­er­a­tor that does just what it sounds like it does. We’ve got­ten a great response to this, and you can see some of the results in the READ Flickr pool.
• In Octo­ber, Amer­i­can Libraries mag­a­zine cel­e­brated Open Access Day by open­ing its archives and mak­ing the cur­rent issue avail­able to every­one for free. In 2009, watch for HTML ver­sions of cur­rent issues (not just PDFs) and expanded con­tent. Con­grat­u­la­tions to Leonard Knif­fel and his crew for tak­ing such a big step!
• At the same time, the AL folks decided to open up their weekly email newslet­ter AL Direct and let any­one sub­scribe. I don’t have any­thing at all to do with the pro­duc­tion of it, so I don’t think it’s self-promoting to say that I think this is one of the most valu­able cur­rent aware­ness tools in the pro­fes­sion. Full credit for the con­tent and deliv­ery goes to George Eber­hart, and my involve­ment has been mainly to advo­cate that *every­one* should be able to ben­e­fit from his hard work. Now that can include you, even if you’re not an ALA member.
• Finally, ALA Con­nect just com­pleted alpha test­ing, and now we’re prepar­ing to start beta test­ing next week. This is one of my really huge projects at work, so it’s quite a relief to finally be at this point. It’s been a long and…educational road to get this far, but we’re get­ting very close. So far, the feed­back has been pretty good, and I’m look­ing for­ward to launch­ing it soon. This is one of the things I’ll be talk­ing about more here in the future but for now, I’ll just say that I couldn’t end the year on a bet­ter note.

This was also an amaz­ing year of travel for me, includ­ing spe­cial trips to the Nether­lands (and the won­der­ful DOK), south­east Asia, and Lon­don. I know how lucky I am to be invited to speak in these places, and I’m thank­ful for the peo­ple I’ve met and the expe­ri­ences I’ve had along the way. It’s easy to get tun­nel vision about loca­tion, region, type of library, or the pro­fes­sion in gen­eral, and my trav­els reminded me of the big­ger pic­ture and ded­i­ca­tion we all share.

I also trav­eled a lot domes­ti­cally this year, and while I know times aren’t easy, I hope we never lose the face-to-face con­nec­tions that are so valu­able to our pro­fes­sional and per­sonal devel­op­ment. Long live the con­fer­ence, uncon­fer­ence, regional meet­ing, or what­ever type of event brings us together. I hope that we as a pro­fes­sion can find the right com­bi­na­tion of online and offline to feed our pro­fes­sional con­nec­tions and growth.

Before this turns into one long verse of Kum­baya, though, there were hic­cups in the year, and there are some things I hope to change in 2009. I’ve got­ten much bet­ter about not spend­ing too many hours just work­ing or work­ing only on the com­puter, but those changes came at the expense of read­ing my RSS aggre­ga­tor and blog­ging here. I’m again exam­in­ing how I spend my time to try and fig­ure out a way to do more of both of those things. While I won’t go back to work­ing more or give up the time I’ve gained for fam­ily and friends, I do hope to redis­trib­ute some of that time to get back to blog­ging more.

So hope­fully you’ll see more action here in the com­ing year. In the mean­time, I hope 2008 was a good year for you, and that 2009 is even better!