Author: SocialXYZ

I think Google+ is great. Ever since I abandoned Facebook a year ago, I have been wanting to share content with my closest friends. My problem with Facebook, at least at the time, was that I could only share content with everyone I was connected with. With Google+ I can create dedicated circles and target my content. After all, I am a different person when I am with my family, different when I am with my friends and different when I am in the workplace. Do these worlds merge on occasion, of course, and it is always nice to share across social circles. However, I think the approach Google+ has taken reflects this real-world phenomenon.

That said, I think a major hurdle with Google+ right now is the public profile. Currently Google requires that members have a public profile with some basic information, such as a name. The problem with this idea is that anyone can place you in their circle. I was just added by someone 1) whom I have never met and 2) whom none of my friends have ever met.  This notion is similar to how Twitter functions, but it is more alarming since 1) everyone on Google+ must have a public facing profile and 2) Google+ hopes to integrate every aspect of your web identity from documents to photos. It is possible to block users and I have already blocked my share of social spies, as I call them.

I still see a lot of potential with Google+ and I hope it begins to pickup more steam. I have been reading that, although the initial buzz has been great, the usage has dropped off considerably. I also hope to see a better integration across Google products such as YouTube, Blogger and Documents.

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A brief update to my previous post, New Elgg Installation on fsc.SocialXYZ.com.

I am conducting a very interesting study that looks to compare a hybrid class with an online class. The course title is the same, but I have the feeling the perceptions of the software will be quite drastic. Additionally, I have the sneaking suspicion that students in my online course will be turned off by the initial complexity of linking SocialXYZ with Twitter. Granted, the process is not exactly straightforward, but I did my best to minimize the number of integration steps, by allowing students to tweet directly from SocialXYZ.

That said, I feel the start of the semester went nicely. I currently have 50 active participants posting interesting content to the site. From these 50 participants, 45 have helped complete a pretest, which is a fantastic response rate, especially for my online class. The survey is anonymous and I cannot identify who responds and who doesn’t, so the fact that I was able to achieve a 90% response rate is amazing. As for the data, I have no intentions of looking at it prior to the end of the semester, but I look forward to the responses…

 

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Last term I introduced twitter into my course online learning platform (fsc.socialxyz.com) in upper-division information systems courses at SUNY Farmingdale. I collected data towards the end of the semester and turned a conference paper around in a matter of weeks (see http://blog.socialxyz.com/?p=23). Granted, I have been working within this area of research for some time and had most of my content analysis ready before I conducted my posttest. That said, I was excited about the positive feedback I received from reviewers and look forward to sharing my research with the larger IS community.

HICSS, which stands for the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, is the premier conference in my field and getting a paper accepted can be challenging. While some reviewers are primarily interested in new ideas and topic, other reviewers demand high quality research. And it’s hard to luck out and get only reviewers that are interested in researchers performing novel ideas. From my experience, and this is my fourth HICSS paper, meeting the criteria for HICSS can be more challenging than some journals.

This year the conference is located on Maui and takes place in January. Not bad, huh. One aspect missing from this blog, aside from an audience, is the lack of multimedia within my posts. Soon, hopefully, I will share some screenshots of my old and new software to give a better idea of the kind of experiments I am running.

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I just finished most, if not all, the changes for my next experiment this fall.

My research took a slight detour after I found out that Google+ doesn’t play nice with Blogger, Google’s blogging engine. I thought it would work great in the classroom where students could decide who in their circles they wanted to share information with. Unfortunately, there would be a bit more development work on my end to get this to work correctly. This is especially a bummer because it’s always nice to be the first to experiment with a new technology. C’este la vie.

So, instead, I am going with the latest version of Elgg, with some personal add-ons of course. While I don’t want to dish out all of my changes, since it’s work in progress research, I am integrating the platform once again with Twitter and plan to create a more interactive Twitter experience for the classroom.

Should be fun. We’ll see.

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I recently noticed a pretty neat, yet scary, feature of Google+.

I was riding my bike through downtown Brooklyn when I stopped to take a picture of the Quay St. sign. Just the other week I was playing a friend in Words With Friends when he killed me on a triple triple, which is what I call hitting a triple letter on a triple word score, with the word QUAY. After he put me down about 100 points, I text him, “what is a quay?” Not to digress too much, I took this picture of Quay St. (find yours here: Quay St., NYC,NY).

I then noticed a notification on my Google+ account. Right now I don’t have too many friends, so I was curious. As it turns out, it was my picture of Quay St. uploaded to my Google+ account. The good news is that it doesn’t upload and share with your circles. The bad news is that it will upload almost any picture you take with your smartphone.

All in all, a pretty neat feature, but I can definitely see the downside…

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