On December 1, at 10:13 in the morning, I was cordially uninvited from a lecture by General Hillier at the Vancouver Public Library. They were quite polite about it. They even apologized for any inconvenience that canceling the lecture caused me. The small problem was that I had never been formally invited in the first place.
The Vancouver Public Library (VPL) uninvited me on my Facebook profile. This notice showed up in my news feed right between Jessica’s rant on 19th century women’s medicine in India and a video of a surprised kitten. Neither of these things made the notice more noteworthy. The post in and of itself was noteworthy because the VPL only sends on average three status updates a month so I always notice them when they arrive. I dutifully went to their Facebook page and looked to see if I had overlooked the invitation. In the past two months, I had been invited to three events: a workshop on intergenerational writing, a panel of speakers on the Olympic Games, and a presentation of stories by Coast Salish writers….but no talk by General Hillier!
This got me to thinking, what exactly was this page for. Is the VPL one of those people on Facebook who just collects friends? Possibly, but then why do they announce some events and not others. Are they worried about overwhelming us with all the events that they hold. Clearly, they haven’t met my friend Jerry with his incessant quizzes and Farmville. I’ve learned to cope with a wealth of status updates and I’m pretty sure I could handle more from the VPL. So why isn’t the VPL talking to me on Facebook?
Are they somewhere else? Undoubtedly on their homepage, but I wanted to see where else the VPL was talking. Looking about furtively, I finally found them on Twitter. Unlike their Facebook page, the VPL Twitter feed is replete with news, fun facts, answers to questions I didn’t think to ask, and even a job notice. Looking down to October 28th, I found the invitation to General Hillier’s talk.
Clearly Twitter is where the VPL truly networks. So why do they have a Facebook page at all? Or why don’t they make better use of it? There’s no mention of it on their website. They’ve done a better job advertising their Twitter feed insofar as they did once announce it on their news page, but I had to use Google to find that out. Indeed, there’s no mention of Twitter on their home page or anywhere in their current news page, presumably since the account’s been around for quite some time.
This raises some serious questions. Why aren’t they advertising these services if they are spending time updating them? And why are they maintaining a page that they really don’t use? The former applies to the Twitter feed. It looks like a great service, but I would hardly have discovered it if I hadn’t gone looking. And the Facebook page is underused. They could delete it or let it die one of those slow internet deaths. But perhaps they should take advantage of one of many services for cross-posting to both. I may be in a long-standing argument with my friend Mike about leaving his dirty Twitter hashtags on my Facebook newsfeed, but that’s something that’s easily fixed and not even applicable to the sort of Tweets that the VPL is sending out. The VPL need not feel fragmented between different on-line profiles; they can still get their message out to both.
I should be more appreciative of the fact that the VPL tried to notify me that an event was canceled period. After all, I may have heard about it from other sources, perhaps even Twitter, and been intending to go.
Meanwhile, the moral of the story for me was that sometimes you have to be cordially uninvited to find out you were invited in the first place.
