Library Stuff

Here’s my July/August column in Information Today Magazine.

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The title of this column is based on the main track from the soundtrack to Toy Story. The song, written by Randy Newman, portrays the kinship that the characters Andy and Woody (and later Woody and Buzz Lightyear) formed and solidified through helping each other, being there for one another, and surviving together. Friendship is epitomized by a sense of trust, sharing, and caring.

On the web, I think it’s easy to make friends (see My Space, Facebook, and Twitter) but hard to sustain them. While communication is easy, sometimes it’s too easy: We invite so many people into our world that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with what everyone is doing. Some people (including me) have started to reject potential new friends so we can concentrate on those we already have.

Keeping Up With the News

Your friends have blogs, Twitter accounts, del.icio.us accounts, photos on Flickr, Amazon wishlists, stories they Digg, stories they share on Google Reader, and more. The list can be infinite. If you can think of a Web 2.0 product, there is a sharing mechanism in place. To keep up with everything that your friends are doing now, you have to read what they blog, read the Tweets they write, see photos and stories they post, and check out the links they share. There has to be an easy way to do this, right?

Enter FriendFeed (www.friendfeed .com). Built by former Google engineers who know about great web products (see Gmail and Google Maps), FriendFeed lets you keep up with everything that your friends do online, with an extra 2.0 kick to keep things exciting. There are also third-party applications that make the Friend-Feed experience even more useful for the end user. But let’s start at the beginning.

Signing up for the service is free, of course. First, place all of the services you want to share with others in your account. The FriendFeed folks make it so easy that you don’t have to locate feeds for your accounts to add them into the mix. For example, for Flickr, just use your username; for Google Reader, add your shared items URL; and for Twitter, use your username. Once you have these set up, your FriendFeed page has been created. For example, you can see mine at www.friendfeed.com/stevencohen.

Now that you have all of your content in one place, start grabbing your friends’ content. One of the easiest ways to do this is to search for their names. You can also have FriendFeed look up your Gmail, hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail address book and find fellow FriendFeeders, which you can then import into your account. (This service is very user-friendly.)

Commenting on the Content

When you have your contacts in place (you can also add more as new friends sign up), just log in and you will see all of the new content produced by your friends in reverse chronological order, which is similar to the popular RSS aggregators. The social aspect comes into play when you start reading the content. If you enjoyed one of your friend’s pieces of content, click the button that says "like." This will now show up on the lists of everyone else who follows this person. You can also comment on the content. (In fact, many conversations take place on Friend-Feed when they would previously take place on the systems that FriendFeed wants to bring together.) If you want to follow a friend’s Twitter and blog posts but not their Flickr pictures, use the "hide" feature. This will hide all future Flickr photos from that user (although this can be undone).

FriendFeed also lets you post directly to your personal page without having to use your various services. This enables FriendFeed to meet its mission, which is "to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends." In fact, the concept is so simple that every time I log in, I slap myself on the forehead and mumble, "Why didn’t I create this service?"

Sharing Space With Like-Minded Librarians

Recently the folks at FriendFeed created a feature called Rooms, which enables like-minded users to be a part of a smaller community within the larger one. For example, there is a library-related room called Librariology (http://friendfeed.com/ rooms/librariology), where like-minded librarians can share content in that space. This was an obvious addition to the great service FriendFeed already supplies.

Will FriendFeed become the new killer app? I don’t know. But it is easy to use, it never goes offline (unlike Twitter), and I have actually started going to my Friend-Feed page before launching my Google Reader in the morning. And if you know my addiction to RSS, that’s a big deal.

(My last blog post on Google using librarians was well linked. To be sure, I did say that I would only write about law libraries and marketing, but I may have stumbled upon something else. So, if you liked/hated the Google post, try this out.)

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Here are two recent press releases put out by ALA:

1) June 20th, 2008 – ALA Disappointed with House Passage of FISA – "The President of the American Library Association (ALA), Dr. Loriene Roy, expressed disappointment today with the result of the U.S. House of Representatives vote on FISA reform – the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (H.R. 6403). “There were far better versions of this bill that would more effectively protect our civil liberties from needless and illegal surveillance,” Dr. Roy said. “We have taken a woeful step backwards.”

2) June 28th, 2008 – American Library Association Receives $1 Million Grant from Verizon Foundation – "The American Library Association (ALA) will launch an innovative project to track and measure the impact of gaming on literacy skills and build a model for library gaming that can be deployed nationally. Funding for the project will be provided by a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation."

The new FISA Amendments are, among other things, a way for telecommunication companies (of which Verizon is one of the biggest in the world) to be lawfully allowed to hand over private data to the government without the fear of getting sued by citizens. It’s basically a free pass at giving away our private information without any legal repercussions. It’s a huge step backward for privacy rights and ALA is dead on in rallying and lobbying against it.

But then they accept a grant (I’m assuming that it was applied for and not just given to them) from the same huge telecom that is taking a big part in trying to get the new FISA amendments passed? Verizon would love to trade in private citizen data to the government if it meant they would be immune from multi-million dollar lawsuits (as any bigco would).

So, ALA has contradicted itself. While they continue to fight for privacy rights, they will just as easily take funds from the same company that they are trying to lobby against. Now, I won’t go so far as to say that this is a bribe, but there it is. What happens when ALA lobbies harder against FISA and Verizon’s role in it? This just doesn’t add up.

Of course, this grant is going towards something supposedly good (although, IMO, the jury is still out on gaming and literacy, but that’s not the point – I would have published this post if it went towards something I believed in), but does that make it right? I don’t believe it does.

Should ALA give the $1 Million dollars back? On one hand, it’s a slap in the face to Verizon, but on the other hand, it’s a slap in the face to all ALA members that believe in privacy…

You can also discuss this post over at FriendFeed