Google+ Communities as Plazas and Topic Boards
Venue
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15), ACM, New York, NY (2015), pp. 3779-3788
Publication Year
2015
Authors
Michael J. Brzozowski, Phil Adams, Ed H. Chi
BibTeX
Abstract
Researchers have recently been focusing on understanding online communities in
social networks that offer easy access to new audiences. In this work, we conducted
a mixed-method study of public Google+ Communities and found two major types
evident in both how users talk about them and how they appear to use them: plazas
to meet new people, and topic boards to discuss common interests. This reflects two
common motivations users cite in describing Communities: "meeting like minded
people" and "finding great content". We characterize these two types of Communities
within Google+ using mixed methods including surveys, interviews, and quantitative
analytics, and expose differences in user behaviors between them.
