LibraryTechtonics

I’m entirely entertained by the influx of librarians on Twitter. I’ve been using Twitter since back in October, and it’s thanks to Chris Brogan, one of my PodCamp buddies, that I got hooked in the first place.

My husband considers it “The Killer App for Stalkers,” since you basically text the world with your current whereabouts and do-abouts, via the web, your phone, or IM. I’ve always kinda though of Twitter as a way to keep in touch with my PodCamp buddies, since those are the people I had Friended there, and who were Following my Twitters. I never really thought of it as something to blog about. It was a sort of separation of Church and State, where it was a separation of Social and Professional, yet still something I used as a networking tool, just more fun. For me, it’s a little weird to have non-PodCamp folks Following my Twitters, since it’s been such a non-librarian group-specific tool for me. But it’s not bad weird.
I Twittered from restaurants, from concerts, from home, from work, from the airport, at my other Twitter Friends (placing an @ symbol in front of someone’s username will result in a notation in the Twitter message that the Twitter is in response to another user). I put a Twitter badge on my MySpace page to share my Twitters.

It’s kind of addictive and terribly fun. As addictive and fun as my new Facebook habit (there’s a Twitterish feature called Status on Facebook, too). As addictive as texting friends from your phone as a regular everyday thing, because, well, I do that.

Steve Lawson had an interesting recent post about Twitter, with a reference to David Rothman’s question post about how he wants someone to tell him why library folks should care about Twitter. I myself have been trying to think of how libraries could use Twitter, and the fact that I’ve never mentioned here before the influx (that I noticed, they may have been there all along) of librarians is kinda telling.

I’ve seen quick queries go out on Twitter (I sent one out myself last night), and friends try to help answer them. I s’pose librarians could watch the main page feed and see if there are questions that need answering, sort of a random MeFi on speed or something. I definitely think that, by playing with Twitter, librarians could understand and experience the texting culture, and experience it in a more familiar way that doesn’t involve crazy thumb typing on a phone number pad.

Otherwise, Twitter is just, well, Twitter. It’s fun. It’s cute. People use it and like it a lot. The lack of an easy answer to the “why should librarians care?” question is a prime example of how not every technology can or should be easily integrated into the library environment. Sometimes it’s just good enough to know that these things exist, and they are indicative of a cultural trend with technology, and that we should keep an eye on similar technologies. Heck, we might even be able to see the trend and then do something proactive with it.

Tags: technology