Marsco Information & Research

I trialled using Habbo Hotel the other week, for an online discussion I want to hold for a work project.  My colleagues and I had a bit of fun coming up with outfits and dancing around the room.  Here’s what we thought:

• We liked being able to have ourselves represented as people, although it took us a while to work out how to move around.
• We liked being able to choose how we looked (to a certain extent).
• We liked being able to have a private room that was password-access only.
• We didn’t like that we could only use a limited number of characters in one go.
• We didn’t like that our speech bubbles disappear off the top of the page so you can’t go back and look at people have already said, if you are concentrating on writing something you might miss part of the discussion.
• We all found that backspace didn’t work when typing something in, maybe a technical glitch?  We were all using IE7.

To be fair, Habbo isn’t really set up to have meaningful discussions in, maybe most users don’t want that.  There was also an issue about getting a transcript, we would have to have a member of Habbo staff in the room at the same time to get this, I’m not sure what effect this would have on the conversation, even if they are not joining in, it’s a bit strange having someone standing in the corner.  Although it would be possible to use it for my project, I thought I’d investigate other options.

Fortunately that day Phil Bradley had blogged about Meebo Rooms - thanks Phil!   It sounded just like the sort of thing I was after so we had another trial, and this is what we thought:

• Meebo Rooms look like IM but are based online, this is familiar to lots of people making it easier to use.  I haven’t used MSN Messenger for few years (people kept wanting to talk to me!) but Meebo had the same feel and I got into it straight away.
• Although you can register, you don’t have to!  All I need to do is give the participants a url and password and they can log in.  They can also change their username from ‘guestxxxxx’ to something more meaningful.  Much, much easier than Habbo.
• It’s easy to scroll up and look at what has been said, plus the conversation is colour-coded according to who said what (you can also choose your own font/colour).
• You can personalise the room with an image or logo, giving it more of an official appearance.  In theory anyone could set up a Meebo room in our organisation name and download a logo from the website, so it doesn’t prove that we’re ‘official’ but certainly helps.
• You can share websites with each other.  As my project is about online social networking this could be very useful if participants want to illustrate a point.  It also means we can have our organisation website up to promote it and help with the ‘official’ feel.
• The only downside is that it hasn’t got the fun elements of Habbo Hotel.  However, I think Habbo’s cons would irritate people after a while to cancel out the pros.

So hopefully we will be using Meebo Rooms, and I’d recommend anyone wanting to do something similar to check it out.  Habbo appeals to the sort of person I need to recruit as a participant, but I don’t think our data will be as useful/interesting as it would from Meebo.

I’m currently trying to arrange a space for a virtual discussion group for a work project.  I’m hoping to use Habbo Hotel (due to the age of the participants, not because I think it’s great) but it may not be suitable so I’ve been looking at alternatives.  I’ve found most of them on I want to, but am always looking for more.  LibrarianInBlack mentioned Yugma recently, it looks good, but I don’t want my participants to have to download anything.

I’m hopefully going to trial Habbo this week (if they let me but that’s a whole other story) to see how it works for discussions.  Will everyone actually ‘listen’ to each other or just type their answers to questions over the top of each other?  Anyone had any experience of this?  Whatever I end up using needs to be simple and young-person friendly.

Will report back!