Thing 18: Facebook and MySpace

Facebook me!
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1616301577&ref=profile#/home.php?ref=home

Yikes 3 days and I am so far behind!!!!
No! No! I did not skip 17. 17 is between 16 and 16 revisited. Anyway getting back to facebook, I found that going through the tutorial videos to be very helpful. I went through more than just the one. ( I just wish I had done it before going to Facebook) It really helps to read the full lesson before starting. I joined a couple of groups and found 1 friend from the library program and discovered a number of old high school chums just by having my high school listed. I also wrote on the wall and sent a couple of messages to melloves23things. The last time I wrote on a wall and floor I was three and a half years old, wrote Zorro all over and my mother decided I was ready for school.
I also visited MySpace. I liked some of the library sites because of how they were really geared for teens and tweens. This is so important to maintain their reading and participation in library activities and I can see how this may help to re-popularize the library. I was not impressed with some of the individual accounts, however. I am not sure if this is because of some preconceived ideas of this website or because I had difficulty navigating the site and the tour video did not want to download.
At any rate I had a bit more preference for the ease of use on Facebook. I also liked the fact that you had to get permission from an individual to list them as a friend. This allows a network of your own design. When I googled Facebook vs MySpace, I came up with 7,330,300 hits or something like that. Then when I went to one article it had had 12 comments within the last hour. Everyone enjoys voicing their opinion about this question so why should I be the exception. Not that long ago there was a news story about sexual predation and Facebook vs MySpace. Both websites were very aware of these issues and working hard to try and develop programming to root out the predators and have a safer site. Although MySpace seemed to be more accessible to the child predators, it was found that Facebook was beginning to get more. In a library we have to be aware of this especially if we are having unsupervised children and young adults utilizing these websites.
I believe that Facebook is growing because of the networking phenomena. In college in frats and sororities, these were our social networking and acquaintances that we utilized for jobs or other services. Although Facebook is fun and can be recreational, I see it more as a professional network site. Whereas MySpace is more for music and basic friendship and socializing. Of course, I could be wrong.