Facebook as a backchannel

Facebook has been attracting a lot of attention recently. Once everyone you know - okay, those you deal with online - has asked why you're not there, you join. Then you join a couple of groups. Then you look at who's in those groups and you find people you already know, so you ask them to confirm your friendship. (Tip: don't accept people you've had nothing to do with as friends, it gets silly and unmanageable.) And then you're off on another mad, time-wasting, social computing distraction.

Or are you? If you're reasonably disciplined and you ignore a lot of the fluff (including the ads), Facebook could actually prove quite useful. The American Library Association has a presence. Over 800 members. All interested in keeping in touch with each other and their world. They can comment out in the open or send private messages to each other.

Searching for 'information professionals' or 'library' doesn't bring relevant stuff straight to the top of the heap. Goodness knows what the algorithms are but they look as if they could benefit from more effort, like allowing quotes to group words together. It occurred to me that a kind of 'backchannel' for Information World Review might be interesting. It would be a chance for contributors and readers to discover each other and exchange views and information. It escapes the strictures of the blog and the readers letters page.

It could, of course, end up becoming a nightmare, in which case I'll close it. But as long as we refrain from abuse and don't try to sell, it might end up quite fun. Pop over here if you're interested. It only started a few minutes ago, so come back from time to time. You can enrol yourself, there's no approval process at the moment.

See you there?