Thing 14

I'm already on LinkedIn. To begin with, when I was invited, I thought it was some dodgy spam, but the friend concerned confirmed that he had meant to send it, and so I signed up, out of politeness mostly. I rarely use it, all of the people I'm linked to are either colleagues at work or former colleagues. If any of them wanted to contact me it would be much easier for them to send me an email.

A schoolfriend once gave me his opinion that social networking requires a monopoly. I think he's got a point. LinkedIn might be useful if you're the sort of person who posts drunken photos on facebook that you wouldn't want a future employer to see. I think it wise to assume that everything on the internet is visible to everyone and will stay there forever.

Thing 13

I'm glad to see that thing 13 doesn't require setting up a facebook account, probably because it's the thing most of us have already done. Even my mother in law has one. In terms of library use, in the Bodleian Law Library we have used it mostly as an additional way to disseminate information. We also use twitter, a blog, instant messaging, rss and our webpage.

Perhaps we could interact better with our users; in terms of actual contact with individuals we operate mainly face-to-face and by email. It's really a question of time; rss and twitter feed into web pages and facebook without extra work, and allow our readers to choose to use the method of communication they're most comfortable with. I wonder how long it will be before library posts include social networking in the job description? Perhaps they already do!