Thing 8: Communication - Web 2.0 Style

I remember the day, not too long ago, when my good friend Lori showed me how to text message on my phone. I used to do it the old fashioned “scroll through the three letter choices gosh this is painfully slow” way and rarely sent messages. All of my buddies were writing me gobs and gobs of messages and I would respond with “yes, call you later” because that’s all the patience I had.

Once I learned the beauty of T9 Letter Prediction software on my phone I was in text messaging nirvana. (you have it on your phone, by the way, and probably don’t even know it.)

Anyhoo, I love the instant quick answer you can get through text messaging and I think it would be awesome if we began some sort of text SMS reference service. I found it funny that the article we were to read on texting was from 2005 and it already seemed a bit behind the times!

I think text messaging (or chatting, or even emailing) from a smartphone is the way everyone will be communicating in a few years. The Iphone has proven that people love to stay connected, informed, and organized with a small portable device. I was laughing at an article I read yesterday online...Dan Moren from Macworld.com wrote:

"Ask your average iPhone user if they spend more time on the phone or on the Net, and I guarantee that the majority of them will say something to the effect of “Holy crap, it makes phone calls too?”

Once you have a phone that does so much, you just don't want to take the time to call when a message or email will get the job done. If we, as librarians are to stay relevant we need to get on the messaging bandwagon. I'll be the first to jump on.

I've done my fair share of Ask A Librarian chat duty and I loved it…I’m a fast typist and I found it easy to interact with patrons through this service. I remember the urgent “I want it NOW!” feeling from patrons mentioned in the article. I never had a problem reminding patrons that I would take me a minute or so to look up their information. After all, through these services patrons should remember that although our method of communication is high tech it is old fashioned personal service they are after.