In re FB integration, first thing I would ask for is importing friends. Like when you join Twitter and it lets you import friends from other sites or from email contacts. It’d be nice to be able to friend a large bunch of people at once who are in my “Library” friends list on FB.

I know it seems awkward compared to social networking sites, but I believe we need distinctions in a professional networking tool. I’m willing to be wrong about this, and admittedly, some of this is based on my own experiences (not the boss part! :-p )but here’s my reasoning.

1. Not everyone wants to call their boss their “friend,” so this gives you a way out of that. “Co-worker” or “colleague” them first, before they can “friend” you.

2. If you’re at all well-known, people you don’t really know will “friend” you, and you may want a way to distinguish them from your real friends.

3. Because in the future, we’re hoping to give you more control over who can see what. For example, when we implement the new conference event planner, I’m hoping to give you the option of displaying where you’ll be when to specific groups. Many folks will want to display this information only to their friends, not to everyone on their network.

4. There’s no one good term we’re all going to agree on. We could go with “colleague,” but are you going to want to be able to identify the people who are more than that? Originally we had “contact” to cover this category, but someone requested we add “colleague” because it better described the folks on her board.

That said, we may still pare down the options. Maybe we’ll take a vote in the new Connect group. :)

Usability
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1. I also have all of those complaints on a list (plus a few others), and I’m hoping we can address at least some of them in the forthcoming upgrade to Drupal 6. If you know Drupal at all, you can tell that we’ve already hacked core to address a variety of interface problems, so we’re trying to find a good balance between hacks (which cost $) and usability. Keep telling us what isn’t working for you, as those items will get a higher priority.

PRIVACY
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2. I can certainly appreciate that you don’t call folks much (I don’t either), but if you put your phone number in your ALA profile, you thought it had some value at the Association level and it’s been displaying in the member directory all along. Connect actually gives you a greater level of privacy, because only folks in your network see it, not all ALA members. Plus, it’s an optional field, so you can always remove it.

Overall, at the Association level, we don’t discriminate against any contact method. Whatever you put in your profile is what we display, so we’re trying to give you more granular control in Connect.

Also, I want to point out that Connect wasn’t built to be a social networking tool. It’s a *professional* networking tool designed to help you leverage ALA to improve your career, so one of our goals is to help you network in any medium, not just online. That’s why the future conference event planner will help facilitate f2f networking.

3. We display names of people who have logged in during the last half-hour, and even then it’s only a random selection of 15 of them. This is where it gets difficult to balance competing interests, because I’ve actually watched people look at this list, see someone they know, exclaim with delight, go to the person’s profile, and shoot them an email to say hi.

That said, I’ll add the ability to cloak yourself to the list of potential enhancements, although I can’t promise when we’d have the resources to add that feature. We’d probably still default it to display publicly since no personal information is displayed to non-members, but your concern is officially noted. Thanks for highlighting it.

FUNCTIONALITY
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4. As you noted, there are plans to add the functionality that’s missing. We’re coding as fast as we can, and we have a lot of big, awesome things we’re adding to the site.

INTEROPERABILITY
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5. Several people have asked the same questions as you and Derik – how will Connect integrate with existing external sites. While I understand that desire (and that’s why we’ve made sure everything has RSS in and out of the system), I’m not sure what other functionality you’re looking for, so I’m hoping you can expand on that.

I have a couple of ideas but overall, I’m not convinced that members want their social lives mashed up with their professional ones. For example, if we import Facebook info into Connect, I don’t think we can offer a granular method for displaying information only from your “professional” groups or only your “safe” status updates. If we were to display that complaint you posted about work, a colleague, or your affiliation with the “I Love Popcorn” group on your Connect profile, how are you going to feel when your colleagues see that on your professional presence?

Honestly, though, I’d love to be wrong and make Connect live everywhere and vice-versa. Let’s talk this (and other issues) through. You and Diane inspired me to create an “Improve ALA Connect” community on Connect. Go to http://connect.ala.org/node/75799 and click on the “join” button in the right-hand sidebar to keep the discussion going.

Thanks again, Emily. Speaking up can make a difference, and I hope everyone does give Connect a try, because you’re right that there are some new opportunities there. If we take advantage of them.

I want more people to contribute because any social community needs a balance of people and contributions. You’ll note that I’ve tried posting a few starters and am still waiting for responses. I’m not giving up because I know that most members won’t even grasp what ALA Connect is until seeing and hearing about it at ALA Annual.

As far as members having a few more privileges, I’m not as bothered because I really want everyone to be a member of ALA. I especially want rebels and people like me that want to fix things to join. The way to make it better is to participate. Just my 2 cents today.

I’m testing whether I can add them in more than one category, but I can’t select multiple at once and I hope it will list both categories by one name rather than list the person twice…

I think that it also provides a service that is built for library issues, and that customization and “personalization” towards our professional needs might turn out to be something that we aren’t getting somewhere else. If you are in the library and information profession, chances are a large portion of your colleagues do belong to ALA, so even if you aren’t a member, being able to interact with these colleagues on ALAConnect will be a good thing.

Generally, I would like to encourage users to try ALAConnect because I think ALA is trying to do a service for its members and the general library community. If the organization is offering a space in which users can become more involved, even if they aren’t members, that they might be more apt to join ALA and become involved on that level. Yes, it might seem somewhat self sustaining, but the fact is, ALA provides a lot of advocacy work on behalf of libraries and librarians on a scale that other smaller professional organizations aren’t able to accomplish.

In regards to the “clunkiness” I think that some of these issues are going to be alleviated by future Drupal upgrades. Jenny can address this more in depth. Furthermore, the more use ALAConnect gets, the more impetus ALA has to fund it to implement the upgrades and improvements that will benefit the site to make it less clunky and more usable. ALA staff are very responsive and without the support of ALAConnect’s constituents, it cannot grow to become what I think it has the potential to be.

This all being said, it is hard to reconcile the non-member vs. member issues, and I think that we need to hear from more non-members about how the site works for them.

Thanks for commenting, Steve.

But I’m having a hard time reconciling the last paragraph of the post with the rest of the review. From the review, I get the impression that the site mostly works, but is kind of clunky, confusing, and duplicates what we can find in other sites. But the last paragraph encourages us to all go adopt it right away. Happily, I don’t think that will happen. I’d prefer to see our communities grow more organically, finding the channels and tools that suit them on their own, rather than depending on ALA to deliver everything. I can understand why ALA offers more services and functions to members than non-members, but that simple fact will keep most non-members (such as myself) from being very excited about trying to build communities on ALA’s turf.