Creating .... Creating Havoc Again

As I stated in my "In the beginning ..." post, I wanted this to be as anonymous as possible so that you, the reader, could focus on the ideas, examples, etc. rather than the person. I will, of course need to provide some details about me in order for you to take me seriously BUT I hope that my content will say more than my history.....

In order to do this, and to be as 'chaotic' as possible I needed to have a 'presence' on the Internet and I had seen someone post as "creating havoc again" on some educational technology forum many moons ago. At the time it had struck me as a great 'handle' so I checked if that was available in GMail and 'lo!' it was. The decision was made and I went out to try ad get as many 'creatinghavocagain' accounts as I could.

GMail and Google+
Creating a GMail account was easy but building my Google+ account seemed to be such a pain, especially as Google+ seemed to have real problems working across my 3G conection! It took ages to build my profile as the page seemed to time out a lot. However, it was much easier and quicker when I managed to find a super-fast broadband connection in a local library!! However, this is one to watch in the future... is Google+ a dog on a mobile connection? I hope not, since I would like to make it the hub of much of my discussion and content.

Facebook and Twitter
These two were, like GMail, equally easy and allowed me to set up accounts in minutes. I had chosen a nom de plume designed to be accepted by the Google+ and Facebook real names systems and so setting up accounts went well.

I also set up other accounts, most noticeably an About.me account which I a oping to use as a "front end" .... but we will see ..... some of the about.me set up is REALLY EASY, other parts seem a little contorted and weird! More on this as I progress.

Friends+Me
Now I've been down the rabbit hole of multiple social media accounts before and although you can work with them individually it just becomes a pain after a time. So I wanted a way to synchronise my social media life around one social network and, after some consideration, I chose Google+. There is a perception out there that Google+ is a bit of a 'Ghost Town' but in the area of education and education technology this is certainly not the case plus Google+ provides a great deal of control over the way that you and those who follow you interact. There were other reasons, and perhaps I will write about them, but for now just acept I wanted to use Google+

Hunting around some more I found a number of posts by +MikeElgan talking about the Friends+Me service that enables users to post on Google+ and have those posts routed to other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Setting up Friends+Me could not have been easier and now I am set up to create content in Google+ and have it delivered to both Facebook and Twitter .... we'll see how it works???