Tweeting and Facebook

I can see the appeal of Facebook- it's a quick and easy way of keeping with what people you don't necessarily see all the time are doing, keeping track of old friends from school or uni or distant relatives or whoever. It obviously doesn't take the place of good old fashioned human interaction but it can help at least keep you in the loop about when you mightn't otherwise have the time to talk to. Okay, I hardly ever update myself and have a tendency to skim through most of the stuff people post but on the whole I'm okay with Facebook. Twitter I'm less keen on. The idea that we actually need to keep everyone up to date on the insignificant minutiae of what we are doing every second of the day as presented in some the explanatory material is a bizarre one to me. I found particularly amusing the Twitter in Plain English video which presented Twitter as finally solving the problem of not being able to let everyone you know when you're mowing the lawn or having a cup of coffee. Yay. Maybe I'm a cold asocial individual but I don't feel the need to be that in touch with everyone I know. The occasional Facebook update on whatever random thing has happened in your life I can see the appeal of, the boring day to day stuff less so.

As tools for the library I can see they have their uses. Not a huge amount for a public library but they are just a couple more means of disseminating information and given how popular they both are probably pretty good ones. To extent they are tools which help you preach to the choir as if anyone is going to friend your library on Facebook or follow its twitter feed is probably already going to be a fairly keen user, which is great, but I don't know if I can see it as being that much of a tool for reaching new people for somewhere like a public library.