Widgets and Twits

For this exploration, I made a LibraryThing widget first while I was waiting for Twitter to get its ... 'stuff' together so I could sign up (augh, errors, errors galore!). The widget’s on my 2.0 blog now, and it’s a little inconsistent so far. Sometimes it shows 3 books, sometimes 4 or 5. I seem to recall asking for 6 covers to show at once. Oh well. As Happier Blue said, sometimes you just have to try these things repeatedly – that’s what the 2.0 experience is all about.

Twitter, once I was actually able to sign up, is both a fun and frustrating experience so far. The sheer number of errors I’ve encountered with Twitter!! I totally want that Fail Whale shirt (or pin, or whatever) that you library peeps are tweeting about. Anyway, I’m cheshire_c on there. I’m following my fellow library folk that I could figure out, so come follow me back.

One of the fun things about Twitter is how easy it is to think of one sentence (or a sentence fragment, in some cases) and just stick it up there, any time of day or night. It doesn’t take the effort of composing a complete blog entry. And it seems to actually be designed for the little, inconsequential things that aren’t worthy of a blog entry or webpage, such as the fact that I had Indian food for lunch, or that I brushed an ant off a woman’s shoulder at work. Tidbits like that are fun to share and, so far, fun to read – it makes the tweeter’s daily life more real somehow. It’s like writing a novel of your life, one teensy fragment at a time.

I’m not seeing immediate practical applications of Twitter to the library world, if only because it’s never non-buggy long enough. I don’t like the idea of spending time, money, or effort on unreliable software for work use. I suppose it could be used for an easy inter-office communication, but on the other hand it’s extremely casual and it would be far too easy to slide down into the personal side of it... maybe not so good for work. I can’t really see patrons buying into the idea of following a library’s tweets, either... it sounds like the sort of thing a system would try but no one would ever bother to follow. But it’s good to know about it, and I’m certainly enjoying playing with Twitter. When it works.

After (eventually) signing up for Twitter, I stuck a widget of it up on my 2.0 blog as well. And then as I’d seen Orangerful do, I figured out how to do an import of tweets to my personal LJ blog as well. I hope. We’ll find out at 9.27 p.m. if it actually worked. :-) So I’m down with the widgeting.

And for widgets in the library world – Oh, the potential! Imagine a library home page that a patron could customize. He could have it automatically show widgets with program updates, or the weather in his community (walk or drive?), or the local news (a madam just one block away! shocking!), or a weekly library poll. He could set up widgets with the local book club’s LibraryThing account and feel proud of what he’s read with the group or keep track of online discussions. Or his own LT widget (or something similar, so many options) keeping track of what he’s read. Or a widget alert to new titles coming in.

People are getting used to customizable home pages that work for them, the individual. We could do the same thing and make ourselves so much more useful online!