A science librarian I know ends all of his e-mails with something that makes me chuckle every time I see it:
“No….I am not on Facebook“.
Cynicism aside, the truth is that Facebook is an important outreach space for academic librarians who want to communicate with users on their terms, to engage them in chat and be social with them. Facebook is “the” platform at the moment for creative reference librarians.
Facebook’s 1.6% sale for $250 million dollars is a win-win for twenty-something CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who decided last year to pass on Yahoo’s one billion dollar Facebook bid. This means Facebook is valued at about $15 billion dollars, wow. Zuckerberg – now armed with so much cash – can put his ideas for Facebook expansion into action and prepare for an initial public offering sometime in 2009.
While 23 year old Zuckerberg says he won’t go public for at least two years, Facebook will be an advertising mecca in the interim by increasing its audience of nearly 50 million active users who connect daily to friends through microblogging, photo-sharing and other social activities.
Microsoft’s acquisition of such a small part of Facebook is a symbolic win over rival Google. After all, Google has outpaced the operating system giant throughout 2007, in profits and mindshare of web searchers. Microsoft’s social networking site, Live Spaces, has attracted about nine million users, and its Academic Live Search tool (now embedded in the name of this blog) is all but forgotten in academic circles.
Microsoft knew it needed this win. From here, watch for more convergence of social software and search tools in sites like Facebook and MySpace.
The question is: will libraries follow suit?
Yvonne Chan
lse721
“Microsoft’s acquisition of such a small part of Facebook is a symbolic win over rival Google.”
Symbolic (for now), yes. But overall, I don’t see this as a win for Microsoft as they grossly overpaid for Facebook….although Ford hasn’t been burning up the market lately, I have a very hard time believing Facebook is worth $15 billion while Ford Motor Corp is valued at $18 billion.
Dean,
If you are on Facebook you might find this Library Search Portal application developed at UNC Chapel Hill of some interest:
http://apps.facebook.com/unclibraries/
Hi gents,
Interesting comments. Over-inflated valuation of websites is nothing new, but I take your point JBI.
Jim – can you send me some information about that UNC Libraries page? How it came to be? – Dean