September 2008 - Posts
I was asked by a few people outside the University to give an update about Newspace. Newspace is the University's social networking site for new students, based on Ning. I'll give a short update on how it's been used, what next and go over a couple of interesting issues. The bit at the end may give the 'Web 2.0 for free' naysayers some ammunition!
So first, a quick summary on how its been used. Sorry if this is a bit dry and quantitative! At some point we hope do a bit more of a detailed statistical analysis, but here's a summary. We've had 961 students join Newspace, which is a sizeable portion of our intake. We advertised in three ways - an email to students before they joined, a postcard flyer in their joining packs, and a link from the front page of the website. There have been about 280 conversation topics in the main forum - favourite topics have been finding people in the same accommodation and course, and nearly all topics have a good number of responses (probably a few thousand messages in total). On top of this there were 44 groups created, all with their own forums, and a huge amount of use of 'person to person' comments - I can't find an easy way of getting stats on this at the moment. Finally, one of the strengths of Ning is that users can customise their own profile page, and a lot have done this.
Ok, so it's had a lot of use. What next then? In some ways we have a bit of dilemma.
We created Newspace for new students, and my expectation was that use would slowly decline as students came onto campus - after all, they can now meet face-to-face, and now they know one another can easily become Facebook/MySpace friends. We'd then create a new NewSpace for next year. The fun about trying something new is you don't quite know whats going to happen - and at the moment it's still being used, perhaps not quite as much as the flurry of activity when, say, rooms were allocated in halls, but it's still quite steady (and more nocturnal)
We were tempted to open it up to all students and see what happened, but on the other hand, we think maybe it only worked as a 'NewSpace' because all the students were new and in the same sort of position.
So we've decided to stick with our orginal plan for the time being, and keep Newspace as a place for new students. There's nothing to stop other students from joining, but once you are a member of the University you've got full access to MyLearning Essentials (our VLE) myCommunity (although it's fair to say we've seen more activity on NewSpace than MyCommunity and Newport Facebook groups combined...)
If NewSpace does carry on being used and looks like turning into a more permanent fixture we'll obviously rethink.
Finally, what other issues did we face?
We had two main problems to deal with - Google Ads, and a disagreement between Ning and a third party Widget provider. I'm being quite open about these in the hope that it's helpful to other people looking at doing a similar thing.
Let's start with Google Ads. The Ning service is free, if you take Google Ads. Not a problem to start with, they were all for education type things like accomodation services...until I logged in an one day, and got confronted with ads for a couple of other Universities.... NOT GOOD!. The problem with Google Ads is they are personal (I think), so I don't think other people got these, but I can't be sure. So, we decided we needed to remove them ASAP. It only cost £11 a month to get rid of them - but it wasn't that straight forward to arrange payment, just because our Finance people weren't really geared up to paying for this sort of web service (credit card only, monthly debit, in dollars). Still they were very helpful, and we got it sorted quickly.
The next issue is perhaps the most important, as it shows the sort of risks you take when using a free service like this. We used a third party plug in from Widget Laboratory to provide an instant messaging service on Newspace, and this was really popular with some students. Then there was a dispute between Widget Labs and Ning, and the widget was terminated with no notice due to Widget Labs allegedly breaking T&C. There's more about this here:
http://developer.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1185512%3ATopic%3A63551
The Widget was reinstated after while, but then withdrawn by Widget Labs, who, we believe are now developing for Social Go. I've no idea of the rights and wrongs of the case, but it shows (as with the Twitter text messaging) how you can't rely on these sort of services for critical applications. In this instance it was just a minor inconvenience, but it was an interesting experience. It hasn't put us off, but we'll be hedging our bets, and registering with Social Go as well to keep our options open for next year.
I presented our plans for Microsoft Vista and Office 2007/8 at our Information Strategy Panel today. A quick summary of the plan is as follows:
Vista
We are going to switch to Vista for new PC deployments later this year (unless the user/area has a reason to stick with XP), and we'll switch the student labs to Vista next summer. We aren't going to roll it out to any other PCs apart from to academic staff who need it for teaching/research reasons.
Microsoft Office 2007/08
We'll start rolling out Office 2007/08 out later this year, to academic schools first and then corporate departments. Lots of training and support will be available, as the interface is completely different.
Why do it this way?
Vista is a tricky one. Obviously it's had a huge amount of bad press, and it doesn't have any 'must have features' that make it worth deploying to existing staff PCs. However, it does have some useful features, particular for us on the IT side (easier imaging, better security model) and it seems quite clear that the next version of Windows is going to be Vista part 2, so there isn't much point waiting to see if something different comes along next time. So just using it for new deployment seems to make sense, and XP will be gradually phased out.
Office 2007/08 is more straightforward. Most people seem to prefer it, its starting to be the version that most people (especially students with new PCs) will be using at home, so know is the time to start upgrading so we're in line with user's expectations.
Now the proposal has been approved we'll start putting together a more detailed project plan.
I guess most people with even a passing interest in technology will have picked up on the news that Google have just released its own web browser, Google Chrome. Three questions really - 'why?', 'is it any good?' and 'will anyone use it?'
Lets start with a picture first though...
What you see there is the default home page, with thumbnail links to your most commonly accessed pages, the ability to search your history, and your recent bookmarks and tabs. All very nice - I like it. The thumbnail links seem to be 'inspired' by Opera, but sadly hardly anyone uses that, so that will be new for most people.
So why have Google done this? Well, they've put their version of the answer as a comic strip!
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
The long and the short of it is that they are saying that current browsers are intrinsically flaky and dated.
OK, but what does this really mean? I'm speculating here, but all the innovation in the browser market recently has been around FireFox. I know of virtually nobody who knows enough about IT to be able to choose a browser who uses IE. Obviously Google has invested heavily in application development, so does it no longer trust the open source FireFox community to deliver a good enough browser to deliver the cloud computing experience is obviously believes is the future?
There's been a lot of talk about a Google OS, but I wonder whether actually this browser is kind of a future OS? Without wanting to get too technical, Chrome has OS-like features, in particular separate processes for each tab (or application) and a task manager to manager the processes. Are they trying to render the host OS irrelevant?
So is it any good?
From a user interface point of view, so far, (and I've only used it for a couple of hours) I love it. I rarely bother with bookmarks (other than del.icio.us) so the default front page (as described above) is great, and the interface is fast and clean.
Google clearly know who they've got to impress first - there's a menu link called 'Stats for nerds' that's clearly hit the mark - have a look at: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=stats+for+nerds
And it has some really odd features. You can resize text boxes - a nightmare for web developers.
So the big question. Will anyone use it?
The fact is, most people just want to browse the web, and just use whatever browser they are given. If they haven't got any need to change they won't. FireFox probably has around a 20% market share at the moment (web stats are notoriously unreliable), but it's difficult to see how they could push their market share any further. Google, though, have an advantage. They also control sites that people actually want to use - search. YouTube, Gmail etc. If they can make using those with Chrome significantly better than with IE then maybe, just maybe, they might succeed.