Thing 15 - Social Networking

Online Socail Networking is an online socail community. In this communty you control how much other people in the communty can view about you by accepting or denying their "friendship." Should libraries join these communties to reach it's patrons? I am going back and forth on this, I don't think it would be intrussive, as long as we didn't make it so, we could simply let our patrons know that we have an account within that community and if they want to be our "friend" they would extend the invite to us, not the other way around. I do think that it's a good way to make the younger group feel that we really do want thier opinions and our account would be set up to appeal to them. There could be links to our website, lists of top selling young adult books and links to those authors sites, and best of all they could add their opinions and questions in our comment section and as long as we kept up with reading and responding to those they would truely feel like they mattered to us, which of course they do. Would it work? I'm not sure. I know when I was a teenager the last thing on my mind was hanging out with the library unless I had a report due but even them it was like a chore. I just don't know if the teens of today are going to think of the library as their "friend." An information source in times of need - yes, a friend - probably not.