"It would be weird if all your professors had Facebook"

I find social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace fascinating.  Perhaps it is simply that my own reluctance to embrace the on-line exhibitionism involved in these kinds of sites reminds me of the generational divide separating me from my (current or future) students.  On a mildly more academic level, I've suggested that the NCAA needed to come up with a policy for such activity by college athletes (although it has issued warnings on the matter, it has no official policy). 

I think it's generally also good advice for law school career counselors to warn students that if they don't want a hiring partner to see it, it probably shouldn't be up on the web (check out the Suffolk's career office's warning -- under the title "*Attention Myspace and Facebook.com Users*"-- on their web site here, or Michigan's warning, suggesting diligent self-Googling, here).

I'm also intrigued that at least some universities and professors are starting to use these sites to to communicate with their student bodies.  Under the headline "E-mail is for old people," the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story last year which suggested that universities could leverage student interest and participation in social networking sites to improve communication between faculty, administrators, and students.  Should law schools join the club?

According to the Chronicle story,

College officials around the country find that a growing number of students are missing important messages about deadlines, class cancellations, and events sent to them by e-mail because, well, the messages are sent to them by e-mail.

Students seem to prefer Facebook and Myspace to "traditional" forms of communication like e-mail.  Colleges setting up social networking pages have used them to communicate with students, posting notices about important events and deadlines.  One administrator who had helped set up a college Myspace page described using Myspace is similar to "being able to walk into a residence hall and everybody's door is open."  Not everyone is convinced:  some students fear that identifying a university as your Myspace "friend" might be "lame"; others worry about the "weird[ness]" associated with professorial efforts at social networking.

Some law professors have involuntary Facebook affiliations, like Paul Secunda described in his amusing post last year.  Others, particularly those with extracurricular activities involving works of fiction, have Myspace pages to promote their novels.  And of course, how can one forget the myspace page of the Sadistic Law Professor? [UPDATE: Richard Bales of the Workplace Prof Blog had a post on this two weeks ago, which describes his own efforts to construct "professional" social networking sites].

Still, in a quick search, I could only find three law schools with (unofficial?) Myspace groups: Pacific-McGeorge, Florida International, and West Virginia (of the three, McGeorge's seems the most official, in that it has a bio of the school on the front page). Facebook requires membership in order to search for groups or pages, but using a hi-jacked password I found a bunch of student groups at individual law schools, but couldn't come up with any organizational pages.

There are some obvious downsides apart from "lame"-ness.  Someone at a law school would obviously have to figure out how to use these sites and then build one.  The site would have to be regularly monitored to keep things clean and avoid offensiveness (although I understand one can limit the ability of others to post message's on a hosted site).  It may also be that features of TWEN sites or internal sites hosted by schools and universities already serve the functions of the social networking sites, at least on an internal level.