The Online Social Networks 2005 Conference ended on Wednesday, although the site will remain up for registered attendees until the end of February. Participants will receive a CD-ROM of the archived comments, not exactly a conference proceedings, but as close as you can get with a gathering such as this.

There were, theoretically, 450 people registered for OSN05, but it seemed much smaller. Some people were online all the time, others (like me) didn’t spend all that much time reading the messages. I thought it interesting that the second largest number of posts (172) in the Cafe was on the topic of “Intelligence and Journalism.” The largest was the Introductions (234) but that’s not 234 unique introductions, as many people responded to someone else’s personal introduction. The Library Table had some interesting posts, but there were only 37 of them. Thought-provoking were comments from non-librarians about the tendency of libraries to concentrate on collections rather than community. Librarians point to the growing pains libraries are experiencing. Some librarians are way ahead of their user groups, in a technological sense, and are both committed to an older, preservation-minded model, while embracing online access through wifi, email, chat, etc.

The third week of the conference was supposed to concentrate on “Where do we go from here?” I think by this time, people were getting tired. Three weeks is a long time, even for a virtual conference. I didn’t really hear a consensus on future actions; suggestions seemed rather tame to me.