We all know the stories about 2-3 year olds playing Playhouse Disney on the computer with mom and dad. Just this weekend my 8 year old nephew and 10 year old niece showed me the websites they built on freewebs.com where they posted a few of their favorite games (it was great to see classic Pac-Man included!), as well as some cute quizzes and guest books to sign. So the question is not when do children start using the computer because I think we have more than enough proof that use of computers starts pretty early, but at what age should our children get social online? What messages do parents need to communicate to their kids? How good are the security policies on places like Facebook and MySpace AND are parents even aware of them?
When speaking with a few other GenX/Boomer parents this week it was interesting to hear that they were all aware of the dangers of letting their 12-15 year old children…especially their daughters on social networks, however not one of them could talk about the different security options on the sites. I was amazed that people that claimed to be very involved parents had not even visited the sites to see what they’re all about. Even if you “ban” a site from your home computer, do you think your kids aren’t logging on from their friends’ computers, or other places?
Look, I know there are crazies out there that take advantage of children online, but kids will get online one way or another so parents need to get involved sooner rather than later. As many internet safety sites state, in the end it all comes down to the time tested policy of open and honest communication with our children. Speaking to them about how the internet works, what is and is not appropriate behavior online and what concerns you have. Simply cutting off access or “spying” on your kids is not the answer. So, put away the PDAs and cell phones and have a straight forward talk to your kids. Am I preaching to the choir here? How do we reach those parents that are not electronically connected?
To those readers with pre-teen or teenage children please share your thoughts. What has worked/not worked for you?
For those interested, below is a small sample of the many internet safety sites available for both kids and parents:
If your dog doesn’t already have a Doggyspace account it may be missing out. This site was launched in mid July and already has a big following. According to the site “Doggyspace is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who love dogs. People use Doggyspace to keep up with friends, upload funny dog videos, and to give their dogs their own cyber place.”
It’s a novel idea… A place for dogs and their owners to connect and interact. I checked out the site, and to be honest it seemed very sparse. I’m a dog lover and I’m not opposed to getting JD (best dog ever) his own page, but the site didn’t seem to offer much. There are very few features or networking tools to speak of. There are a few pics and videos: They were all about as exciting as Tylenol PM.
The idea isn’t bad but it is likely that they are just trying to capitalize off the success Myspace and Facebook have achieved.
Take a look at the site and let me know what you think. Does your best pal spike need his own page?
After reading Ian’s post last week about how in the new age of connectivity the lines between what is work related and what is personal are not only blurred, I was reminded of an article along the same subject line. The article discusses several court cases in the US involving young people charged with driving while under the influence of alcohol. In these cases, prosecutors have accessed the defendants’ Facebook and Myspace pages and made sentencing agreements and recommendations based on the perceived behavior of the defendants in the photos posted on the sites.
In one case, a defendant was sentenced to two years in prison rather than probation because between her DUI arrest and conviction, pictures were posted to her Myspace page showing her to be holding a glass of wine and joking about drinking. Distasteful, but not illegal. According to the prosecutor this photo evidence showed a sufficient lack of remorse on the part of the defendant and therefore warranted a harsher sentence. Read More »
A CNN article yesterday announced that MySpace will now be cooperating with OpenID. OpenID is a service that allows you to sign in to a variety of web accounts with one user name, password, and registration. Wordpress, AOL, Yahoo, and Google are just a few examples of participating websites. I haven’t used OpenID yet, but it seems like a great service. I am always forgetting the different user names and passwords I have created for different sites. I try to use the same or similar information at every site, but there are always some sites that have to be difficult by forcing weird syntax for your login credentials. OpenID eliminates all of that confusion. Another great benefit is that you don’t need to fill out new registration information when joining participating sites.
This service is a great example of the collaboration which is taking place between rival internet companies. MySpace also collaborates with Ebay and Yahoo by allowing users to have one set of profile information that is shared by all 3 sites. These companies consider each other to be competitors, yet they are working together to create an easier, more efficient customer experience.
This is refreshing to see, and I for one would be happy to never fill out another pesky website registration ever again!
A friend of mine informed me that you can check out the new facebook profile layout early (but you need to install the developer application to see it) — it goes live on the 17th of this month. In case you don’t want to install the application to check it out for yourself, here’s a screenshot:
I would actually go so far as to say that the screenshot and cropping job that I did actually makes it look a lot better than it does in your browser. If you don’t check it out now, you’ll see it when it goes live in a couple of weeks. My concerns are chiefly that things aren’t where you’d expect that they are, and wherever you do find them, they’re ugly.
The issue is that this new design doesn’t agree with existing user habits, and therefore gets in the way of simply using the platform. There’s quote that says that technology is anything that doesn’t quite work yet, it seems that the current version of facebook simply worked in so many ways that it ceased to be technological and was just useful. My concern is that this new layout will push the platform back into the domain of technology for its users, resulting in much frustration and many loud complaints.
A survey published by the Rasmussen Reports, “an electronic publishing firm specializing in the collection, publication, and distribution of public opinion polling information,” found that 49% of Americans believe that the federal government should regulate the Internet the same way as radio and television.
This was in response to a Missouri woman pleading “not guilty to charges in an Internet hoax blamed for a 13-year-old girl’s suicide.” Lori Drew, a 49-year old mother, allegedly created a fake Myspace account “to send cruel messages to a 13-year-old neighbor Megan Meier, a friend of Drew’s daughter, including one stating the world would be better off without her.” Meier committed suicide after these messages were received. You can read about the incident here.
With huge talks about Internet piracy it seems that Internet harassment is an issue we haven’t discussed. According to the survey, 73% of Americas believe that it is a crime to harass someone over the Internet. So what will the impact of this trial lead. I believe their will be substantial consequences to this trial because:
1) This is the first federal charge involving the well-known social networking website, Myspace.com, and
2) The decision of this trial will push law makers to address the issue of Internet harassment on not just a local level, but a national one
Now, I know that this is my second post about security (my first one covered internet infrastructure in Estonia but I believe it should be spread across the blogosphere. How can a parent sink so low to use a social networking site teens use to express themselves to emotionally hurt one of her daughter’s friends? If Ms. Drew is convicted it will be interesting to see what implications this decision will have. I will keep a close eye on this trial to see the final verdict. This just shows the Web 2.0 has evolved parenting. It appears that cyber-bullying is starting to get more attention and will soon raise concerns among parents.
So do you think the government should step up and pass policies to stop Internet harassment and cyber-bullying? How should social networking websites such as Myspace and Facebook address this issue?
If you don’t know who I’m referring to, you are clearly not one of the millions and millions of people that watched some iteration of this Chris Crocker video - now that would be a bad rumor to spread. You can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.
Apparently, and I absolutely refuse to search for the videos to verify this, there is a popular series of prank videos floating around the web called “fire in the hole”. In short, people videotape themselves in the process of ordering a drink from a drive-thru, and then tossing it back in through the drive-thru window, yelling “fire in the hole” like it’s a grenade as it hits the worker. The most popular of such videos have apparently been viewed almost a million times. As reported on MSN Today (and a variety of other sources), this happened to Taco Bell worker Jessica Ceponis recently, and the video made the rounds on YouTube. While she was originally kind of scared (thinking it was a personal attack), when she found out it was a “prank”, she got angry - and decided that some punishment was in order.
It turns out that these prankster masterminds might not be particularly bright, and tracking them down proved fairly easy - Ceponis viewed the video, tracked down one of the boys on MySpace, befriended him, found out where he lived, and called his mother (that sound you hear is a few hundred personal detectives going out of business). With the case then turned over to the criminal justice system, Ceponis was hoping for a very traditional remedy - a face to face apology. Instead, she found out they got 100 hours of community service, and were ordered to post a video apology on YouTube - which, because of juvenile prosecution laws, could not show their faces.
I’m a serious LinkedIn user and a casual fan of the Facebook, but that’s it…I’m not hiring anymore. Fact is, the two of them do the job. LinkedIn has my business contacts and enough about me that people need to know. Facebook has now turned up most of the women I dated i high school (full disclosure: Zuckerberg didn’t need to assign a lot of server space for that). I have up to date contact info on Plaxo Plus, but I’m not going to invite people or join any groups. And it’s none of Plaxo’s damn business what “I’m up to.”
In the past week I’ve been invited to join three more networks: BlueChipExpert, Reunion.com, and Naymz (note, I am not adding hyperlinks, look them up yourself if you want). The last one bills itself as “powering reputable professionals.” Reunion.com wants to tease me with a salvo of “finding out who else is looking for me.” Sorry folks, you are too late. I’m sure you have a Powerpoint deck that you use to pitch VCs about how you only need 10% of Facebook, etc to provide an excellent ROI, but I’m not interested. If people want to find me…they can on one of the leading sites.
For those not savvy geeky enough to recognize the reference from the blog title, it is explained here.
With the ongoing turmoil in the advertising industry caused by the internet, a new breed of customer custodians is emerging in the form of internet giants such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Microsoft and AOL. As advertisers strive to make their messages more relevant, customer data becomes the key to better targeting and ad placement.
As a Canadian my enjoyment of most Super Bowls is limited to the game it self, as we are generally limited to watching 4 or 5 terrible ads over and over and over. The prime example last night, a made for TV movie about 4 RCMP officers that were tragically killed on an Alberta farm. (Which seemed like a rather dark and sad thing to be promoting during the super bowl).
However, With the advent of YouTube, Dailymotion and other video sharing sites over that past few years it has allowed Canadians to enjoy all of the greatness of Super Bowl ads. As I was watching the game this year I was amazed that numerous times during the game Fox was actually promoting the fact that all of the Super Bowl ads would be available after the game at MySpace.com/superbowlads. This is great, you can go and watch all of the ads CTV kindly blocked and they are nicely listed by the quarter in which they aired.
My real problem with the Super Bowl, specifically this year as I am a Pats fan, is that the same social media tools that enabled me to watch all of the ads I missed also will continue to add to my misery for days to come. Let’s just say I am not very happy with the outcome of the game, I didn’t watch the last 10sec, or any Sports Centre this morning in an effort to keep all Super Bowl related news at bay. The problem for a downtrodden fan like myself is that web 2.0 technologies are so pervasive its impossible to escape news these days. Facebook updates, RSS feeds, YouTube, Digg, SMS messages from friends who may have won copious amounts of money on the outcome, everywhere I turn I am reminded of the terrible tragedy that took place yesterday.
Thankfully cars.com created some great ads for the Super Bowl that helped take a little bit of the sting away (my favorite ad is below).
Perhaps in time social media also will provide me with some therapy, like this YouTube video that was created to help Cowboys fans overcome their disappointing season.
We all know how the Do-Not-Call list is used to prevent unsolicited telemarketing calls, well AOL has announced they will be supporting a Do-Not-Track list to prevent unsolicited tracking of your online behavior.
Companies like Google, Yahoo, and AOL have been tracking everything we do for years. Although these companies claim that they only record demographic information and surfing behavior (i.e. you’re a 26 year old female, and frequently visit parenting Web sites), it really doesn’t take much to connect the dots and find out your name, address, and phone number. We saw how easy this was last year when AOL released users’ search data to the public, claiming to have no personally identifiable information. The reason why it is so easy to gather information is a result of human nature; everyone does a search now and then on Google to see where you show up on the search results, or look up on Google Maps to see your house from the satellite view. Now your online privacy isn’t so private, and heaven forbid you enter your credit card information, or phone number to see where that shows up.
Although I do support the efforts of a Do-Not-Track list, and preventing people from mining my information, I think it will have a small and unnoticeable impact on information gathering as a whole. AOL may stop tracking me, but I already know MySpace, Facebook, Google, and the list goes on, is already tracking everything I do and using it at their own discretion.
While you may not be able to stop yourself from searching on Google, you can change your searching behavior, and limit your use of non-essential Web sites. See an earlier post on four reasons you should remove yourself from Facebook.
Everyone’s talking about all the new applications popping up for Facebook (did you hear ‘Where I’ve Been’ was sold to TripAdvisor for a cool $3 million?), but here’s something a little different: TrustPlus Inc. is launching the first (to my knowledge) inter-network application for social networking sites. More than a simple mash-up, the company is collecting and connecting information about users from several Web 2.0 sites including eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Craigslist, LinkedIn, Amazon, Friendster, and Backpage.
The premise is that your online reputation (and identity) shouldn’t be fragmented across multiple sites, but rather holistic and portable so that people you interact with get a consistent view of you. Similarly, when you view others’ profiles, you should be able to see how they are rated at different online communities. Building on the post below, this could also help improve the “trustworthiness” of peer-to-peer transactions. From the company’s Web site:
Know who to trust. TrustPlus provides a customized Reputation Score in any situation, weighted by an unlimited number of factors, including who the person knows and the context of the interaction.
Use your good reputation anywhere on the Web. By building a reputation with TrustPlus, members can use it anywhere on the Web. Now online sellers can aggregate their reputations in one place and leverage them everywhere they sell online.
View anyone’s reputation. The “TrustPlus Reputation Viewer,” a browser add-on, allows users to view anyone’s reputation information on-the-fly and across multiple sites.
Interesting blog posting today from wired.com about whether Facebook and it’s ilk are moving the Internet in the right way? Or is it setting up more walled gardens.
From the article:
Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It’s time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor’s little gardens and put it back where it belongs — free and open on the open web.
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are taking the web by storm because they make it easy to manage your personal data and keep in touch with people you know. But to get value out, you have to put something in — photos, contacts, appointments, lists of your interests and your blog musings.
Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you’re sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can’t see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple’s iPod.
This serves companies’ business interests, but not the wider interests of consumers. AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have their own, proprietary instant-messaging systems. They’re all good, but they’d be better if they worked together. The iPhone would be better if it could also be used on Verizon’s and Sprint’s networks, and Facebook would be better if you could link to friends’ pages on MySpace and Bebo. Social networking should be based on open standards, just like e-mail.
When I recently sat down for a dinner with Anthony Gold, who some people might know as the open source guru at Unisys, he posed these two very interesting questions:
Is it still six degrees of separation out there?
Is there still a need for “super connectors” to pull us all together?
As Anthony expanded on in his blog, the reason he asks these questions is a curiosity about how much more accessible everyone is in the age of the Web 2.0. After all, the six degrees of separation theory was based primarily on an experiment that involved how snail mail moved from Nebraska and Kansas to a stock broker in Massachusetts (participants were asked to send the letter to someone they knew on a first name basis that they thought would be more likely to know the broker than themselves) in the 1960s – things have changed a little since then.
For example, if you’re over 30 (which I am, even if you can’t tell from my Second Life avatar), think about how many people you were connected to in your mid to late teens. In all likelihood it was a relatively small group, most of the people probably lived pretty close to you, and over time you lost touch with many of them (particularly if you or they moved). After all, it takes a lot of work to maintain relationships with multitudes of people when phone and mail are your only options, and only a special few can (or bother) to do so – a.k.a. the “super connectors” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell.
Now contrast that with today, and how connections can be made, maintained, and in many cases rediscovered through Facebook, MySpace, various other community sites, and the like. There is no denying that we are becoming more connected, and it’s far easier to maintain these connections (even the ones you might want to be rid of…) – which takes us back to Anthony’s questions.
Exactly how small is the world getting, and in the world of social networking are super connectors waning in influence?
In turn, Anthony posted a few thoughts on how this issue could start being investigated, in addition to some of the challenges tied to it (particularly in defining what exactly a connection is). Does anyone have any other thoughts on how we might figure this out?
One of the hot debates in the human capital world is how much should recruiters review the online profile of new employees — especially those who have recently graduated from college and most likely to have less than professional content on their Facebook and MySpace pages. Anastasia Goodstein and I discussed this recently in a study we wrote for New Paradigm’s Net Generation study. An excerpt:
Decide whether or not to look. If you do look at social networking sites and blogs, create specific corporate criteria for what constitutes a red flag. Recruiters or HR professionals should not be rejecting people according to their own personal biases. Context is key. Everyone has different personas for different situations. You’re not the same person with your boss as you are with your friends. If you’re searching for information about a potential candidate, consider the context in which it is posted. Let them explain. Instead of ruling out a potential candidate right away because of a questionable post or photo, use the opportunity to ask them about it. Check the date of the post. If it’s from high school, their thinking has probably evolved. Use the interview as an opportunity for them to explain themselves to you—even talking about their mistakes can reveal a lot about character. Partying can be a job skill. If you’re hiring for a position in sales or marketing, finding a N-Gener’s profile full of party pics could indicate that they have a skill set that might be help them do their job.
To us, sitting in North America, the battle for the dominant social network is being fought between Facebook and MySpace. However, globally the picture looks quite different. Networks such as Orkut, hi5 and livejournal have come to dominate important market such as India, Brazil and Russia. A somewhat incomplete map based on Alexa rankings was put together by a few bloggers to illustrate the social network ecosystem. One immediate conclusion is that it is unlikely for one global player to emerge anytime soon. The need for these networks to be interoperable will surface as they get more ingrained in their markets. It will be interesting to see if acquisitions or middleware will be the way they come together.
As the battle between MySpace and Facebook for social networking supremacy rages on, it’s starting to take an interesting shape - that is, at least according to Danah Boyd, who in this blog essay argues that MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth. The entire post is well worth the read, but the key point is made in Boyd’s attempt to delineate what we see on social network sites in stereotypical, descriptive terms meant to evoke an image (i.e. don’t interpret what follows too literally):
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.
MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
Of course, one could quite easily argue (and Boyd notes) that this division can at least partially be explained by the history of the two sites - since Facebook started out limited to college students, it was kind of hard for kids that don’t go to college to get on there and start poking each other. Now that Facebook has opened up to everyone, preferences could change, which Boyd is and will be watching with great interest.
Another interesting point she made was that a month ago the military in the U.S. banned MySpace, but not Facebook - and Boyd notes that typically (tied to the discussion above and the class divide) soldiers are/were on MySpace, and officers are/were on Facebook.
Such subjects are difficult to talk about and often make people uneasy, and Boyd notes she was “reticent about writing about this dynamic” due to a lack of appropriate language to describe what she is seeing, and worries that it could be misinterpreted… but it’s certainly an interesting issue to keep tabs on. For other papers and thoughts from Boyd, see here, or visit her blog at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/.
While this may not seem like ground breaking news, it’s an important step for Apple (and a scary progression for music companies). Below I have listed a couple of interesting points and questions that have come up.
Apple is finally acknowledging the power social networking sites have in the music industry, and the importance of the reach of sites like Bebo, MySpace and even Facebook. Social networks provide iTunes with a direct pipeline into the lives of their target market. I am trying to think how to quantify this, and what comes to mind is Coke deciding to put pop machines in schools and completely infiltrating the habitats of their target market.
The music scene isn’t just growing in these social networks, it now lives there. Bebo has 500,000 musicians registered, while MySpace has over 425,000 rock bands, 400,000 hip hop groups and 180,000 indie bands. As it stands right now iTunes will only be selling music from musicians who already are signed and are selling their music on iTunes. What happens if iTunes starts selling music for the most popular unsigned bands on Bebo or MySpace? What incentives do bands have to sign with the big labels?
The Net Generation makes up the bulk of social networking site traffic. As I stated above, this is where the live, these sites are their social calendars and contact databases. It also happens that this Generation is enemy number one as far as the music industry is concerned when it comes to illegal downloads and piracy. Will offering youth easy access to digital music in the places they frequent have any effect on piracy? What if it the music they are selling is DRM free?
Where does this leave other social networking giants like MySpace or Facebook? Should they try and offer a competitive offering themselves? Will they partner with iTunes or develop an offering of their own? How the other large social networking sites proceed over the next few months should be interesting to see.
It often seems that there is no limits on what kids will talk about on the web these days - and now many don’t even do it anonymously, but rather post all kinds of crazy stuff linked to their myspace and facebook pages. While this can shock many older folks, what might really bother them is if (say) their kids started (I don’t know) saying things that (just for example) threatened to sabotage the family business.
You know, like if you were the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers (Jerry Buss), and your star player had publically demanded a trade a few weeks ago, and issued a formal trade request to the team’s GM, while calling you a liar… and then backed off just a little bit, while leaving the trade demand on the table.
Somewhere in there you get busted for a DUI, are trying to figure out what to do about this Kobe thing, have a few meetings, and head off to China for a bit while a few of your family members offer thoughts on the subject here and there to calm things down a bit.
In such a case, you’d probably be doing one of two things - planning to keep Kobe in LA and hoping the story goes away (particularly to help with ticket sales and such), or planning to trade him. But even in the latter case, you kind of want other teams in the league to think you are leaning towards keeping him, in order to help with trade negotiations - rarely does the opening line “we really need to get rid of this superstar immediately - what will you give me?” maximize returns.
In turn, what you probably don’t want to see is your son posting this (as reported in the LA Times) on his MySpace page:
“If you’ve been following the Kobe drama, I want to let you know it’s not really drama … sometimes we all need to make a change in our lives and that’s all it is. Popular or unpopular, when it’s time, it’s time. Good luck Kobe wherever you go!”
Now Johnny doesn’t officially work for the Lakers like the rest of the Buss kids (son Jimmy is the assistant GM, daughter Jeanie is the VP of business operations), but he was the president of the Sparks (the WBNA franchise) until the team was sold recently, and it can be reasonably assumed he is in the loop.
He’s also not exactly a kid, and probably should have known better - because it sure doesn’t make it look like the team is as optimistic about keeping him in L.A. as some of the other family members are saying.
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
