Facebook: An opportunity for MyLibrary
Facebook is an opportunity for MyLibrary.
Again, the MyLibrary framework is made up of four components: 1) information resources, 2) librarians, 3) patrons, and 4) facet/term combinations. Any MyLibrary implementation does not have to have all for components. They can include any or all of them. In the context of MyLibrary, Facebook contains bunches of information about patrons.
Facebook is essencially a list of people and characteristics about them. Names. Addresses. Pictures. Comments. Interests. Friends. Using the Facebook users.getInfo method a developer can retrieve things like a person’s college major. This value can easily map to subject-based facet/term combinations, and once that relationship is established, lists of information resources can be generated and returned to the Facebook user. Use this same information to recommend a particular librarian.
The same users.getInfo method returns lists of books the user is reading. Use that information as a seed to “find more like this one”.
If you wanted to save the patron information, then you could extract things like first name, last name, email address, etc. from users.getInfo and use it to create MyLibrary patron objects. (I’m not sure what you would do regarding passwwords, and authentication is a weird issue since Facebook takes care of that.)
This sounds like a fun hack. Let’s see who can be the first person to put something together.
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