Around June last year, I set up a Facebook account. Why? Because – like the twitter account we set up in December – CW was playing there and I wanted to be cool too. I didn’t think much more about it until two or three weeks back when someone found my profile and friended me.

Facebook is like “grown up” MySpace. Initially membership was restricted only to people with an .edu prefix in their email, as it was aimed at making sub networks based on school/university populations. Now membership is open and you can join a regional network if you don’t want to /can’t join an educational network. I suspect this changed last year when students who outgrew MySpace were transferring to Facebook, but some were excluded due to their email address.

Three things I discovered delighted me:

1) There are 8 groups on my local university network: Murdoch Ice Hockey Team , Murdoch Ultimate , R.U.M. (Rugby Union at Murdoch) , The Iron Chefs of Murdoch , The really really really ridiculously good looking people in murdoch , ABA [aussie bogans annonymous] , MMA (Murdoch Malaysian Association) and the Wii Bowling 240+ club . There are quite a few more which are global with the name “Murdoch” in them, including the Murdoch uni students past or present (2 members), but most of them are protesting about media ownership byMr-ex-Aussie-Rupert.

2) There are 67 groups with “library or librarian” in the title. Most are based on undergrad humour, eg. my goal in life is to bang in the library. , but there is a smattering of vaguely serious and “friends of the library” type groups. Cruelly, the Im a librarian, but im not old, i dont own many cats, and work nights. group appears to be a high school prank….otherwise I would have jumped on that bandwagon.

3) It is easy-peasy to find people you already know using the invite option. If you nominate a Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail or MSN address book, it will check to see whether those people have Facebook pages. Then you can just tick the boxes and select “send”.

I was really, really irritated by the difficulty of searching for groups or within your own network. A search for “University of Western Australia” on the Search Groups page retrieved Murdoch University Alumni. (63 members). A search for “murdoch alumni” did not. I tried to find out how many profiles were within the Murdoch network and I just couldn’t work out how to do it. Any one fare better than I did? Tell me the trick…please.