Should RPG Research Bother with Social Network Sites

Here is the video posting:

Frankly, I have concerns about continuing to use social networking sites such as Facebook and Google Plus due to a number of reasons, including intellectual property rights conflicts, privacy of research participants, and other issues. Using something like Twitter has been pretty straight forward and not an issue, but Facebook, Google Plus, and other more invasive sites bring up more complicated concerns.

This has really been brought to a head by Google Plus's personal registration requirements.

The G+ model really does not map to the goals of the RPG Research project attempting to be a more community centric effort, rather than pivoting around a single individual.

There is already a working Youtube account for the RPG Research Project at: 

http://youtube.com/rpgresearch , 

and it was easy enough to upgrade the youtube account to Google Plus "as is", but then some time later they send their email giving notice that the account will be shutdown, and all content forfeit, if not made more personal. So we just cancel the G+ upgrade and roll back to the previous setup. Of course there is always the website (with chat room, forum, email list, blog, news items, documents, (soon audio & video podcasts) downloads, etc. and without any ads for users to deal with): 

http://rpgr.org and http://rpgresearch.com and twitter http://twitter.com/rpgresearch, 

where folks are all welcome to join and participate of course. If/until Google allows the means for a project non-personal account/page, it will be problematic. There is increasing pressure (due to the issues of intellectual property conflicting rights) to stop spending energy on these social networking sites, and just focus on using our main websites. 

Very much appreciate the invitation though, and hope you and others will keep spreading the word, and join the project by completing the participant questionnaire: 

http://rpgr.org/polls-surveys/participant-online-registration-form 

The real question that matters however is the following:

Will RPG Research's participation on social networks like G+ and Facebook actually have any impact in your participation as an RPG Research Project participant candidate? If we focus more on offering everything through the RPG Research website, rather than spending the time to keep the various social network sites running, would that be of more value to you, or would it be the opposite?

Your feedback is important.

Thank you for your support.