Now that Facebook has released software to let people design their own applications for the site, students can outfit their profiles with all sorts of accouterments — like music playlists, photo galleries, and so on. But don’t expect to see too many profiles with embedded library search applications: Evidently, Facebook isn’t too keen on those tools.
Steve Lawson of See Also… has compiled a list of college librarians who tried creating applications for Facebook, only to be turned down by site officials. Some librarians designed software intended to let students search library card catalogs, but were told that Facebook prohibits applications with “Web-search functionality of any kind.”
Why the apparent hostility to Web searching? “Facebook would like to keep you on Facebook,” writes Jessamyn West of librarian.net. “They would like to take your loyalty for other sites like Flickr and YouTube and shift it to Facebook so they can serve you Facebook ads while you look at the online content you were looking at anyway.”
Librarians contend that there is a clear difference between general Web-search tools and closed-network catalog-search services. And some institutions — like the University of Michigan, which has managed to release a Facebook application (Facebook registration required) — seem to have made that case successfully. We’ll see if the social network relaxes its stance on library search tools in the coming months. —Brock Read
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