Web 2.0 for my friends or, a Facebook Frenzy!

In thinking back over 2008, one of the best things about the year was the proliferation of friends, buddies, and acquaintances I met. For the most part, this meeting took place online, through various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.  Many of my library colleagues have written about how they use these tools for professional tasks, such as staying connected with distant colleagues, getting ideas, answering professional questions, and even keeping up with their patrons (for a great treatise on using Twitter in a library setting, see Brian Mathews' article "Social Eyes").  I've found these social networking sites to be a great addition to my professional life.

But I realize that my face-to-face (f2f), non-librarian friends are not quite as tech-savvy as my f2f library friends are.  I find that I keep up with my real life friends less now that I spend so much time online - my spouse and I even stay connected on Facebook!  He and I have talked about this, and we decided to hold a Facebook Frenzy.

This weekend, we've invited some of our f2f friends who are not as tech-savvy (or "tech-addicted") as we are over to our house for an afternoon of Facebook, Skype, and hulu.  We have wireless, and we've encouraged our buddies to bring laptops if they have them, and we also have some laptops of our own people can use if they don't have a traveling computer.  It's going to be informal, with us showing the three sites, answering tech questions (two friends have just gotten MacBooks, so I anticipate some questions there), and talking about privacy settings in Facebook.

From my own experience, I know I learn best when a friend shows me something - it happened with Facebook and with Twitter; if I hadn't had friends there, I probably wouldn't have explored them.  I want to take my teaching expertise out of the academy and into my personal life -- and I have an ulterior motive:  I want to hang out with my f2f friends online in addition to, well, face to face.