Social networking

Many of the Web 2.0 things we've looked at include the facility to share things with other users, add friends, comment on other people's blogs etc, but these social networking sites are set up with this purpose as their main reason for existence. I had a quick look at Bebo and MySpace and had a bit of a play with Facebook. I actually have a Facebook account and rarely use, so it was interesting to have a look at what was on there. The good thing is that you can add personal friends and also become part of a group - for example I'm part of the Auckland Youth Orchestra group which helps present and past members keep in contact, especially useful for people no longer living in Auckland or indeed NZ. Actually Facebook proved its worth when a friend and I were trying to compile a list of AYO members from the last 10 years for a reunion coming up in October. We were working from concert programmes which had sometimes conflicting spelling of names and were able to use Facebook to identify the correct spelling in a lot of cases, which was a very practical use of the site I hadn't thought of. And yes, there is a North Shore Libraries group! It's actually quite fun seeing who is online out there and discovering people that you know on these sorts of sites.