I’m completely fascinated by online social-networking and in the near future I’m giving two conference presentations about Facebook. My colleagues are aware of my research interest in Facebook and this week Michael informed me that Facebook had released their beta version of Facebook Pages. According to PC World, 100,000 Facebook Pages were made in the first 24-hours of release. To explain Pages in a nutshell, their purpose is to connect businesses to their customers. Of course, librarians wasted no time creating Pages for their libraries — check here for the group Librarians Using Facebook Pages and the Page I created for the Valley Library at Oregon State University.

You might ask yourself, “How are Facebook Groups different than a Facebook Pages?” Let me explain a bit further. The average Facebook user joins a Group simply as a way to show support or unity with a group of people. Once you join a Group, you have to visit the Group site to see if there are any updates or changes. I assume most people are like me — I join a Group, like “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert,” and read the Group’s page the same day I sign up, and then I never look at it again. It would be too annoying to check every Group every day, so I simply don’t check any of the Groups at all.

Enter Facebook Pages. When I join a Facebook Page, I become a “Fan” of the Page and I don’t have to check the Page for updates, instead all updates are continually fed to my Facebook Newsfeed, which I, and other active Facebook users, check on a daily basis. Also, Pages allow you to add different Facebook Applications to the Page — although I’ve noticed most of them are not working yet (blame it on the beta stage). In the future, it should be possible to add Meebo or the JSTOR Application to the Page.

To create a Facebook Page you need to login to your profile and go to the bottom of the page and click on the “Businesses” link. Then select “Facebook Pages“.

Reminder: Facebook Pages are still in the beta stage and there are some bugs to-be fixed. For example, when I entered the hours of operation into the Valley Library Page, it erased the hours every time I updated a different section of the Page. After entering in the hours three times I gave up.