Networking and the library

This morning during my drive to work I heard some interesting figures about Facebook. It seems that ever since the social networking site has gone public (i.e not college student exclusive) it has grown by leaps and bounds. According to the morning news segment I heard on WTTS, if Facebook users were given their own country, their population would be equal to that of Brazil. In fact the average number of friends among users is 150. This staggers me a bit. But there was one last figure that stuck in my mind – the fastest growing population segment for Facebook users is the 35 to 55 age range.
Now I have yet to join Facebook. With three different emails plus two other social/entertainment sites that I regularly use, another website to moniter is just one too many right now. Hearing about the statistics for Facebook made me think a bit about adoption of technology and what makes one site wildly popular and another site fail to garner recognition. I think that what Facebook has going for it (and really what is true of most successful technology applications) is the ability to connect people with each other and with the things that they love. Technology for it’s own sake doesn’t provide enough of a carrot to lure people to it’s use. And while there will always be a select group of people that choose to learn something because it is there, I feel like this is a very small percentage of the general percentage.
Libraries, I think, need to recognize this need for practicality in its application of technology. While podcasts are an intriguing application of technology, if it doesn’t fulfill an explicit need, then I wonder how often it is played. Instead of technology for technology’s sake, I feel like we, as librarians (and future librarians), need to further explore how we can use technology to re-forge the bonds of community. Some of the Next Gen catalogs are attempting to explore this need for connectivity. It’s my assertion that this feature that will prove most important.