This is the Thing I was looking forward to the least. MySpace and Facebook always sounded like they are just for young people. It just seems so "high school" to invite friends and then wait for them to approve you. That said, I continued with the assignment.
In Facebook I joined the American Library Association Members, the Library 2.0 Interest Group, and the Librarians and Facebook Group. ALA updated their profile a week ago. Library 2.0 updated their profile 5 months ago and the Librarians and Facebook Group have not updated their profile for the last 12 months. I joined these mostly because the link was right on the 23 Things page. I have since noticed that it is easy to find groups to join, so if I were really interested, I could join some that are more meaningful to me.
I read a couple of online articles that suggest that MySpace and Facebook are losing some of their popularity due to things like being assaulted by advertisers and marketers. See
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/03/networking_sites_myspace_faceb.html
Others suggest that application developers have flooded Facebook with too many applications and have been bothering users with messages to try their apps. See
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/have_facebook_apps_peaked_in_popularity.php
Young people have a tendency to lose interest in things when adults show too much interest. It's like when a parent helps with a child's science project so much that the child loses all interest and the project really belongs to the parent.
I looked at a few MySpace library pages and see that they provide links to things on their library websites that they think will interest young people. One library had a catalog search on the page too. It's just another form of advertising and it goes to where the young people are, so that should be very effective.
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