ifoAppleStore reported Sunday that many Apple retail stores have begun blocking access to MySpace from their display computers due to a large number of teens using the machines to surf the social networking site. Few, if any, of these teens were making store purchases during their visits, and the visits to MySpace were hogging large portions of the stores' internet bandwidth.

The practice of blocking MySpace is hardly new. As the most popular website among teens, the service is bound to make up a significant portion of internet traffic any place young people use computers. Instead of embracing this wired generation and looking for innovative ways to make use of MySpace and other services like it, some educational institutions are beginning, like Apple stores, to restrict access completely. Just this past week, Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, became the latest college to block students from using MySpace on campus computers. According to the school's chief IT officer, 40% of the school's bandwidth was used for traffic related to MySpace. Rather than try to understand the phenomenon, Del Mar opted to bury its head in the sand.

In the library world, there are some examples of institutions making use of MySpace in interesting ways. Aaron Schmidt at walking paper points to the Denver Public Library's MySpace page as the best library use of the service to date. Filled with all the same loud comments, loud music, and all around bluster we've come to expect from MySpace profiles, the library's page comes off as completely authentic. Best of all, it doesn't look or feel like it was written by someone trying desperately to fit in with teens.

For law schools, however, the MySpace issue is a complicated one. Law students are certainly using the site in large numbers. (If you don't believe this, log in sometime and do a search for any law school community; you will be amazed.) In some cases, even law professors are adding profile pages and adding their students as "friends." As today's teens become tomorrow's law students, this trend is likely to grow stronger. With many schools producing news items about professors who ban laptops from their classroom, the legal education community can seem somewhat stuffy and technophobic to many students. But following the lead of Del Mar College would likely be a disaster for most law schools in the long run. Once a law school becomes known for being "technology unfriendly," it will only attract "technology unfriendly" students, and one look at today's high school students should tell you that "technology unfriendly" students will be few and far between very soon. In addition, with the legal profession moving increasingly towards web-based document filing systems and electronic practice management tools, many law firms would be ill-advised to hire graduates of a law school that de-emphasizes computer and internet know-how.

But the world of hiring is precisely the place where MySpace can and will be a problem for law schools. With the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings fresh in their minds, many law school administrators are certainly taking notice of the placement rates of their schools' recent graduates. Career Services departments are then charged with increasing those rates so a school's ranking can improve. This can involve anything from making suggestions for improving a student's resume to scheduling more on-campus interviews to staging faux-networking events to improve students' schmoozing skills. But as far as I can tell, no one is really talking about the effect of MySpace yet. And they should be.

A time is coming when no employer will hire someone without first searching for that person on MySpace. A student can be professional and likable throughout the entire interview process, but if her MySpace profile is filled with "loud comments, loud music, and all around bluster," a managing partner might very well think twice about hiring her. If a student brags about his excessive drinking, an HR director may not want to take a risk on him in a profession already riddled with substance abuse problems. Everyone knows that people are usually on their best behavior in job interviews. By searching out a candidate's MySpace profile, a law firm administrator can see what that person might be like when her guard is down. And that can often be far more important than her GPA.

Most profiles also include demographic information such as marital/family status, sexual orientation, and religion that employers can't or won't ask an applicant in an interview because of anti-discrimination laws. By disclosing this information on MySpace, law students are serving up the very information an anti-semitic or homophobic employer needs to make a discriminatory decision, and in a way that makes any later accusations of discrimination virtually impossible to prove.

Law schools need to start educating their students about these issues. Employer use of MySpace is only going to increase in the next few years, and students have to realize that every single word and image they put in their profiles can have a serious impact on their marketability. MySpace is purposely designed to make every profile as easily found as possible. By anyone. Users can search profiles by name, email address, school, or profession. Unless a profile contains so many lies as to make it utterly useless, it can be found. And rest assured, it will be found. Even if it contains no identifiable information in the profile itself, odds are a friend will leave a comment that makes the user identifiable. So when a top 10 student decides to brag about his exploits during a recent visit to Tijuana, he needs to know that every lawyer at that big firm he's eying has access to that information.

As Career Services departments become more aware of this issue, so too will Admissions departments, which means prospective students will start being rejected based on MySpace profiles. By some accounts, this practice has already begun.

A little education can go a long way on this issue. Because placement rates can have a huge impact on an institution's reputation, it's in every law school's best interest to make their students aware of the potential negative impact of a MySpace profile. Rather than simply discouraging students from using the service altogether, however, administrators have an opportunity to illustrate to students that, just as a bad MySpace profile can hurt their job search, a well-written page can help it tremendously. Treat a profile like an extension of your resume, and you just might gain a significant advantage over your fellow applicants.

And no one is saying students can't go to Tijuana. They just might want to reconsider how much they reveal about the trip on MySpace.