The friending part of MySpace

I think there are about as many reasons and ways to use MySpace as there are MySpace users – to find new indie music or get "close" to a favorite band, to keep an online journal, to decorate one's "space," to play around with software code, to explore one's identity, or to win some sort of local or virtual popularity contest, to name a few (for some MySpacers it's probably two or three of those at one point, and then it changes as they change). In an in-depth, eye-opening article recently, USATODAY looked at one kind of MySpace use: "friending," leading with Brittnie in Columbus (17), who has 5,036 friends. Some – probably high school "queen bees" or wannabes – would see this as a sign of Brittnie's social status, others (including her peers) as ridiculous or even "creepy," as one of the article's teen sources puts it, given how many people on that list Brittnie actually knows. A lot of people see it as another kind of online game that doesn't necessarily represent anything in real life (and one that can turn sour if No. 7 in your Top 8 friends is in your real life and feels she should be No. 1). Because even this aspect of MySpace is very individual. For example, writer Janet Kornblum mentions one person with 1,327 friends who says she has "standards" for who's on her list - such as no bands or films (who can also be "friends") whose content you don't actually like, or no friends who post sexually suggestive photos or videos. But as involved as friending is, it would be simplistic to believe this is all there is to social networking.

Help for college searches

Parents of high school juniors and seniors may already know this, but some 35 states have Web sites helping students with their college searches. For example, GAcollege 441.com "has already registered more than 100,000 students and families in just 18 months," the Associated Press reports. The site helps students apply for financial aid, prep for SAT tests, has virtual tours of and applications for more than 100 colleges, and includes info on getting "one of the state's full-ride, lottery-funded scholarships."

Latest on Web video viewing

Web videos are hot. "More than 106.5 million people," or about 60% of US Internet users, viewed or downloaded a video from the Web in July, according to the latest figures available from traffic measurer comScore. Yahoo, MySpace, and YouTube are Nos. 1 through 3, respectively, in video-viewing traffic. Yahoo! Sites got 37.9 million "unique US streamers" (or viewers), MySpace got 37.4 million, and YouTube 30.5 million. Time Warner Network and Microsoft Sites came next with 25.7 million and 16.2 million. Of course the same person can be viewing multiple videos in multiple sites. By way of explanation, comScore says, "In total, nearly 7.2 billion videos were streamed or downloaded by U.S. Internet users for an average of 67 streams per streamer, which means the typical video streamer viewed an average of more than two streams per day." Here's TechNewsWorld's coverage.

Multitasking families

Does your family life feel like this too? A new study by Yahoo and OMD Research (of households in 16 countries!) found that families are packing 43 hours of activity into one day, and technology appears to be part of both the reason and the solution. "Multitasking aided by technology extends most people's day by several hours," ClickZstats reports. It adds, though, that "despite the overlapping activities, 72% of families with children eat dinner together each day." Not that all family communications is offline. "Seventy percent of survey respondents say technology helps families stay in better touch. Mobile phones are a means of communication for 29% of families, and instant messaging for 25%. These emerging technologies bring children to the forefront as decision makers within the family unit." In its coverage, Ars Technica quotes OMD CEO Joe Uva as finding that "it's clear that within the '43-hour day,' families are making concerted efforts to spend time together and to live out a new family value that says 'we control technology—it does not control us.'"

Principal sues MySpacers

The next big challenge of the social-networking phenomenon is beginning to show up in news reports. This week the Associated Press picked up a story in the San Antonio Express-News about a school administrator suing two students for impersonating her in a MySpace profile (and last week I included an item about a school assignment gone awry with a student threatening to kill a dog in his MySpace page). Anna Draker, assistant principal at Clark High School in San Antonio is suing the students, both 16, and their parents for "defamation, libel, negligence, and negligent supervision," alleging that the students "set up a Web page on MySpace in her name" and posted obscene comments and pictures. The AP adds that "Draker found out in April that someone had created a page on MySpace. It had been up about a month before she discovered it. The site falsely identified Draker as a lesbian. Klasing said Draker, who is married and has small children, was 'devastated'." Social networkers of all ages are doing the same to celebrities. MySpace "is filled with dozens of user pages that purport to be profile pages created by business luminaries Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Martha Stewart and Donald Trump," USATODAY reports. "Many of the phony pages appear legitimate: They have flattering photos and list seemingly correct personal details, such as income, astrology signs and marital status. But bits of misinformation - and even malicious tidbits - are often tucked in." MySpace says that impersonating profiles violate its terms of service and removes them upon request. The problem is, the minute a profile's taken down a fresh one can be created, which can make stopping determined and/or malicious impersonators a full-time job for both their victims and MySpace.

New social-networking browser

Move over, Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc., etc., now social networking has its own Web browser. I say "move over" because it's quite possible that very social people will use the Flock browser in addition to one of the above, at least while Flock's still in beta and may not have all the features of "traditional" browsers. Flock makes social networking easier by letting bloggers and profile updaters drag photos into their pages – probably its most attractive feature for social networkers, ZDNET reports (I bet *video* drag 'n' drop is coming). "There is also support for updated picture notification; you can maintain a Friends list of others who use Flickr or PhotoBucket and be notified when their pictures have been updated." ZDNET adds that "Flock also takes on a new approach to searching. When you type a search term, Flock returns results from your bookmarks, your browsing history, and live results" using Yahoo search. "The unique thing here is that Flock contains a built-in search engine that indexes the content of every Web page visited" so you can find that tidbit of info you ran across three days ago but just can't remember what site it was in.

MySpace's new safety-ed campaign

The world's largest social site is teaming up with Seventeen magazine, the National School Boards Association, and the National Association of Independent Schools to get social Web safety tips in the hands of more parents and educators. They'll distribute safety brochures (also downloadable in pdf format on MySpace's Tips for Parents page) to "about 55,000 schools representing grades 7 through 12 in the United States in October," Reuters reports.

A first for videogame safety

This is an online-safety risk that hasn't really hit parents' and policymakers' radar screens yet, but it's no less risky than social networking. In fact, it *is* social networking. Game players with Internet connections (such as Xbox Live) can voice-chat and text-message with strangers just as much as social networkers can, if not more, and have been doing so for some time. The online-safety first is that NCsoft Corp. - maker of the massively multiplayer online game City of Heroes - recently announced its "PlaySmart" program "to warn its customers about real-world risks in the virtual universe of its games," the Associated Press reports. Part of the progam is to put PlaySmart guidelines for parents in its games' packaging by the end of the year. Among the tips is "Parents should not only monitor and play the games with their children, but also should be aware of the potential for social interaction that can include voice chat and text-message exchanges." Another key one: don't share your username and password with friends. NCsoft says that kind of sharing is one of its biggest sources of customer complaints. Though physical safety isn't an issue, "accounts can be stolen outright or pilfered of virtual goods such as rare weapons or armor that the true owner spent months or years accumulating."

Latest on 'game addiction'

Some kids are more prone to addiction than others, and based on this report in TechNewsWorld, it's the players most in need of positive reinforcement who are more prone. The reward systems built into videogames are what make them so addictive, the article cites psychologists as saying – for example when the game tells a player he's done a good job. AOL Games recently conducted a study that found 10% of 14-to-55-year-old gamers surveyed admitted they'd become addicted; about 4% "actually hide their gaming use from family and friends"; 33% admit to having missed a favorite TV show due to their gaming habit, 19% have skipped a meal, and 25% have played games "all night until the sun came up." If people think online games are a grownup thing, there is evidence to the contrary: "45% of 'heavy gamers' are under 18 (and "heavy gamers" only account for 3% of the overall gaming community)," found a recent NPD Group survey cited by ArsTechnica.com. "The much broader 'avid console gamers' are one-third kids." Another kind of tech addition, "Internet Addiction Disorder," is explained by anthropologist Stephen Juan at the University of Sydney in TheRegister.com.

Social networking East & West

They're "going global" from countries all over the world, as the International Herald Tribune reports. Once a Korean-only social site, Cyworld has launched in the US and soon will do so in Germany, while MySpace is "on the verge" of announcing its arrival in two Asian countries (if Japan is one, MySpace will be taking on Mixi, "a two-and-a-half-year-old social networking site with more than 5 million members" that just went public, valued at $1.8 billion). The Herald Trib describes the experience of Korean-American Hawaii resident Danny Kim who grew up in New Mexico and had 750 friends on MySpace when he started up his Cyworld account. There are cultural differences in social networking, as in the rest of life, and Kim said he wondered if most Americans would be as attracted to Cyworld's "cute" feel as Asians are. And Mixi users seem to like its "structured approach," as compared with MySpace's more free-form style, with which "members can easily create multiple profiles, add their own programming and post other kinds of media, like pictures, music and videos," according to the Herald Trib. At Mixi (more like the Facebook experience), "a person can join only if invited by current members. Personal profiles are based only on text, except for three photos (premium service allows more). Surprisingly, [Mixi] users do not seem to mind. In fact [unlike MySpace users], most members do not post pictures of themselves, opting instead for photos of celebrities, scenery or pets."

Worm 'epidemic' on MSN Messenger

Tell MSN messagers at your house to be extra careful about clicking on links in IMs. "Last week, two out of three of the most active worms spread over MSN's instant messenger program," the Washington Post's security blog reports. Kids can download all kinds of nasties if they're not cautious about what they click on in IMs. The Post suggests that, "no matter what instant message or email software you use, think thrice about whether you really need to click on any link sent to you via IM or e-mail." To check on a link's legitimacy, start a new conversation with the friend who seems to have sent it, and ask him or her if they really did. If the answer is "no," don't click!

UK kids on cellphones

More than 90% of UK 12-year-olds have mobile phones, according to a recent study in that country. The BBC reports that, among the 1,250 11-to-17-year-olds polled in the Mobile Life Survey, almost 80% "said they felt safer having a mobile and that they had a better social life as a result." Texting is much preferred to speaking on phones in this age group. The survey also found that, while many schools have banned cellphones, 50% of people 11-17 have sent or received text messages during class. Many respondents, "especially teenage girls, admit they would feel unwanted if the day passed without their mobile ringing; overall, 26% said they would feel left out, compared with just 11% of parents. Most parents (71%), the survey found, believe mobiles help keep track of their children. Here's another BBC article on the realities of accessing the Web via mobile phone.

Overexposed pranks, bad results

Unhappy students have been pulling nasty things on teachers as long as there has been school. Now, on the very public participatory Web, these actions can cause more trouble than intended for all parties concerned! Case in point: Apparently in a project about viral marketing, a marketing professor at Virginia Commonwealth University "gave his class an assignment to make his 6-year-old pug [Oscar] famous," the Associated Press reports. Most of the students "posted fliers around campus with the pooch's picture on them," but one student reportedly posted a threat on his MySpace page that he would kill Oscar – even though the assignment said students couldn't harm or kill the dog or threaten to do so. The effect was that "animal activists and others around the globe" called the university and police to report the threat. "After investigating, Richmond police issued an alert saying, 'this threat is the result of a VCU student's assignment that went awry. We want to stress that at no time was any animal in danger'." Charges won't be filed, the AP added, but the university said the student might "receive sanctions, including expulsion," because he violated "VCU's honor code and rules regarding the use of university computers."

The courting of Facebook

Facebook's 22-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg is undecided about Yahoo's $900 million offer for the site, the New York Times reports. He is "a member of the Google generation … too young to remember all the ambitions dashed and fortunes lost when the last dot-com boom ended," which may be one reason for his indecision, the Times suggests. The good news about this offer, if Mark is worried about maintaining control, is that Yahoo "it will keep the company somewhat independent, with Mr. Zuckerberg in charge. This has been its model with other acquisitions like Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service that lets members share lists of their favorite Web sites." Here's the San Jose Mercury News on the Yahoo/Facebook discussion. As for recent changes at Facebook, The Tartan at Carnegie Mellon zoomed in on their real impact (e.g., students at that university will still only have access to fellow Facebookers on that campus). The Tartan also looked at a just-released study by CMU professors, “Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy of Facebook." It found that privacy awareness isn't high – "close to 50% of Facebook users surveyed gave the wrong answer when asked about who could view their Facebook profile. The researchers also found that most students tried to protect their privacy by controlling the information they revealed to the online community, rather than adjusting the site’s privacy controls. When the survey highlighted potential privacy concerns, only about 5% subsequently changed their online behavior" (parents, the figure is probably not much different on any social site populated by teens).

Social networking's impact

"While older adults go online to find information, the younger crowd go online to live," reports NewScientist.com, in a thorough, multipart look at the social Web. Most interesting to me was MIT professor and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle's reflecting on the impact of social networking on individual users and society in further accentuating "the tethered self" – a person who understands himself and his feelings more in relation to others. "It seems to be part of a larger trend in media culture for people not to know what they think until they get a sense of what everyone else think.," Turkle says in the NewScientist interview. Parents, check out the example she gives: "Tethered adolescents are given a cellphone by their parents. In return, they are expected to answer their parents' calls. On the one hand, this arrangement gives the adolescent new freedoms. On the other, the adolescent doe not have the experience of being alone, of having only him or herself to count on: there is always a parent on speed dial. This provides comfort in a dangerous world, yet there is a price to pay in the development of autonomy. There used to be a moment in the life of an urban child, usually between the ages of 12 and 14, when there was a first time to navigate the city alone. It was a rite of passage that communicated, 'You are on your own and responsible.' Tethering via a cellphone buffers this moment; tethered children think differently about themselves. They are not quite alone." And time alone to digest, reflect, and form our own views - not just in relation to how our friends or fellow IM-ers or social networkers think – is a good thing.

Key PC security advice

A newly discovered flaw in Internet Explorer can render family PCs vulnerable to some nasty hacks, the Washington Post reports. Just by going to some Web sites with Explorer, a user can download "an entire kitchen sink of malicious software." Right now it's just a handful of sites, mostly those publishing pornography, but that number is expected to grow, and porn won't be the only kind of site serving up these nasties: e.g., "the incredibly invasive Spybot worm," trojan software that takes control of PCs, and keylogger software that records every key stroke. The Post's PC security writer, Brian Krebs, suggests that, "if you or someone you care about [like your kids!] is in the habit of cruising the Web with IE, now would be a very good time to get acquainted with another browser that doesn't use IE's rendering engine, such as Firefox or Opera." But if you continue to use IE, "make sure you have Windows set to receive automatic software updates, and be very careful about visiting Web sites that are off the Internet's beaten path." Also see Brian's Sept. 19 12:06 a.m. update for further good advice. Also, if you're concerned about identity theft, the Post has a great resource on it, including info on how to avoid it and what to do if you've been victimized.

Popular new kid YouTube

YouTube is like the new kid at school everyone wants to meet (or compete with). This week's signs that the video-sharing site has truly arrived are: use of the site by the US government, fresh competition from Microsoft, and deals with Warner Music and ABC. The White House is using YouTube to expand its anti-drug public-service advertising, putting made-for-TV anti-drug videos on the site," the Associated Press reports. They'll "compete for viewership against hundreds of existing, drug-related videos that include shaky footage of college-age kids smoking marijuana and girls dancing wildly after purportedly using cocaine," according to the AP. "Other YouTube videos describe how to grow marijuana and how to cook with it." At last count, YouTube gets 34 million visitors a month, MySpace Video gets 17.9 million and Google Video 13.5 million, according to the BBC. So Microsoft, whose MSN Video used to be the most popular video-sharing site (before YouTube's arrival), has unveiled some fresh competition (in beta testing): "Soapbox" , obviously designed to integrate well with MSN instant messaging more closely matching the MySpace video-sharing experience. Meanwhile, Warner Music's ad-revenue-sharing licensing deal with YouTube is an unprecedented experiment that some analysts are calling a legal "minefield." Warner's the first major label to authorize YouTube to show its music videos, the New York Times reports. Under the agreement, "YouTube.com will use special software to identify recordings used in videos posted by users and then offer the owner of the copyrighted music a percentage of the fee for advertising that would run alongside the clip. The deal also provides for the copyright owner to demand that YouTube remove the clip instead," according to the Times, which also ran a "video mania" business story. Another deal YouTube announced this week was with ABC and Cingular: a talent hunt for the best unsigned bands on YouTube. The winners will get to appear on ABC's Good Morning America, Reuters reports. This week Forbes aptly asks, "Can YouTube Grow Up and Stay Cool?"

Google's quiet 'precedent'

Google's agreement to turn over user data to the Brazilian government may turn out to be a precedent for how the social networks deal with governments (including those of their home countries), and vice versa. Google's Orkut - with 20 million total users, about half of them in Brazil - is that country's No. 1 social site. Brazilian authorities recently threatened a lawsuit to get Google, which last year refused to turn over search data to the US Justice Department, to give them "data that could help identify [Orkut] users accused of taking part in online communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia," the Washington Post reported. As the Christian Science Monitor put it, "Google's corporate motto is 'Don't be evil.' But the … company recently found itself defending the privacy of alleged pedophiles and racists against São Paulo's attorney general." He threatened Google with a daily fine of $23,000, and Brazilian human rights groups - which counted "some 40,000 images of child porn posted on Orkut between Jan. 30 and Aug. 22" and "thousands of communities dedicated to racism, violence, anti-Semitism, and cruelty to animals" - were "infuriated" by what they saw as Google's stonewalling, according to the Monitor.

Google eventually turned over user data to Brazil that was much more specific than what the Justice Department had earlier asked for ("Google's entire search index, billions of pages and two months' worth of queries," according to the Post). The Internet freedom desk at Reporters Without Borders said it was good that Google made Brazilian authorities go directly to headquarters in the US, so that the American justice system could be involved. At some point, Reporters Without Borders told the Monitor, US Internet companies will have to deal with repressive regimes with regard to social networking. Google said it intends to be cooperative with governments as long as their "requests are reasonable and follow an appropriate legal process."

Online school in demand

Demand for online-only high school in the state of Washington definitely exceeded expectations, the Seattle Times reports. They were expecting maybe 250 or 300 students and each got about 650, with hundreds wait-listed or in the application pipeline. Washington's "two newest online schools" are Insight High School and Washington Virtual Academy, which is K-8. And who are these applicants? "About one-quarter of Insight School's students previously were home-schooled…. Some had dropped out of high school. Some don't like the high-school social scene. Others want the flexibility of the online schedule so they can hold down jobs, or, in a few cases, because they're elite athletes who have an extensive training and travel schedule." If not the level of interest, the schools did expect these fairly diverse characteristics among their students. About all they have in common is that they or their schedules just don't jive with traditional schooling. Pls see the article for the views of both supporters and critics.

Social Web: Early warning system?

People who want to ban the social networks might consider what can be learned on them about at-risk youth. Peers and adults can detect and have found threats in blogs and profiles in time to avert violence, and law-enforcement people certainly are monitoring the sites. The challenge is the obscurity of some of them, such as VampireFreaks.com, where shooter Kimveer Gill posted many hints about violent intentions (he committed the mass shooting at Dawson College in Montreal last week), New Criminologist reports. The Ottawa Sun looks at the importance of early detection. It mentions the arrest of two 17-year-old Wisconsin teens after threats of violence they allegedly made were reported to the principal of their school. "Officers found guns, homemade bombs, ammunition, mannequin heads used for target practice and even suicide notes written by the pair in their homes. They were depressed, hated school and felt like outcasts." Monitoring social sites can also aid the detection of suicidal tendencies, the US's National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told us (it has profiles on MySpace where teens can get their friends help), as well as of eating disorders, self-mutilation, and substance abuse.

Social sites multiplying like...

Remember the gophers in Caddyshack? Or more recently the amazing number of rabbits with which Wallace and Gromit were confronted in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit? Well, there are certain animal-rich scenes in them that come to mind every time I check email these days. Press releases about new social-networking sites are multiplying exponentially. But before you click to some examples (in this week's issue of my newsletter), consider a thoughtful commentary by "technology activist" Paul Lamb in CNET – "Social networking for all" - looks beyond the current SN scene populated by "the young and the digitally restless" to a time when "social-networking tools are put to use in 'average' communities and for the larger social good." He's referring to the "digital divide" of Web 2.0. Each tech phase has one, when the "haves" and the early adopters monopolize the space before the technology becomes more widely accessible. Where social networking's concerned, I don't think that time is very far off. We're already seeing some great signs of the "educational social networking" Lamb refers to in his article (e.g., with teachers talking about having students create profiles for the characters in Shakespeare's Richard III – see MIT Prof. Henry Jenkins' blog). Parents, you'll also want to know that a less idealistic view of SN's 2nd phase is represented in a new study at ResearchandMarkets.com: "Today, a carefree, easy-going global user base comprising over 250 million 15-to-25s is about to meet hard commercial interests as brands try to monetize their investments by placing targeted ads on user pages, based on the personal information contained on those pages."

Watch out for wi-fi

Just about any really cool thing involving technology has an online-safety piece (or lack thereof) that – so far – people think of long after product launch. [The exceptions lately have been operating systems like Apple's Tiger (OS X) and the forthcoming Vista from Microsoft, both with some parental controls built in.] Wi-fi, short for the growing number of wireless Internet-access hotspots everywhere (libraries, city parks, coffee shops, whole neighborhoods, etc.), has its downside too. A CNET article's headline alone sums it up: "Wi-Fi gives kids access to unchaperoned Net." So do wi-fi-enabled devices, such as Web-connecting cellphones, some gameplayers, and Microsoft's forthcoming Zune portable media player that will probably be on a whole lot of holiday wish lists in the next few months. To picture all this better, see a great example (in this case positive) involving a 10-year-old – five paragraphs down in the CNET article.

Social Web: Wide-angle views

The Economist looks at social networking's staying power as a Web-user phenomenon and an international business story. US News & World Report has the very in-depth "Decoding MySpace," which almost seems like the magazine (and Web) version of our new book, MySpace Unraveled. But don't miss the very important view of a high school student in the Boise (Idaho) Weekly. Student Molly Kumar touches on the "social turmoil" that MySpace use can cause (e.g., when one's kicked off somebody's "Top Eight" friends list) and tells of a program at Boise State University called "Space or Face? Using Online Communities Safely," featuring "a lively student panel discussing the stress and blessings MySpace creates for its participants."

Social sites: New copyright issues

Universal Music Group says its talks with YouTube are deteriorating and its talks with MySpace are progressing, the Associated Press reports. Universal's "contends the wildly popular Web sites YouTube and MySpace are violating copyright laws by allowing users to post music videos and other content involving Universal artists," and it will file a lawsuit against YouTube, according to the AP. MySpace "has said it promptly complies with notices to remove copyright-infringing material uploaded by users." But Universal's rules seem to be changing, this report indicates. The label "has made it a priority to get compensation for content that was once seen as purely promotional. Last year, the company began charging Web portals such as Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL for playing its artists' music videos online or over video-on-demand services.

Home entertainment news: Lots of it

Apple has big plans to own the entertainment parts of your house, but so do Amazon, Microsoft, and NBC in a way. The biggest piece (at the moment) is iTV. To be released early next year, it's designed to connect to your TV … and play - without wires - all of the movies, videos, photos and music that sit on your Mac or PC elsewhere in the house," the New York Times reports. Enabling that is the iTunes 7 "extreme makeover," providing movie downloads – joining CinemaNow, Movielink and, as of last week, Amazon.com. Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro lays into Hollywood for making movie downloading so complicated but says Amazon and iTunes are a real improvement. The Los Angeles Times has the story too. NBC will "offer episodes of some of its new prime-time shows for free online viewing on personal computers," Reuters reports. Meanwhile, Microsoft unveiled Zune, which it hopes will compete with the video iPod, the Wall Street Journal says, and maybe steal some thunder from those new iPods Apple also just debuted.

UK social-networking heads-up

A report about social-networking risks in the UK's version of Consumer Reports didn't have any surprising revelations for parents, but it carried weight because it came from Britain's "consumer bible," as Out-Law.com put it. What the report (in Computing Which? magazine) called for, among other things, is that the social networks create a "joint code of practice regulating their treatment of children." The UK may indeed lead the charge in the industry self-regulatory move, but the US probably won't be far behind, if only because the UK's top four social networks, MySpace, Piczo, YouTube, and Bebo, are all California-based. One of the Which? researchers, Kim Gilmour, told Out-Law (UK e-commerce and IT legal news), that "while the research found some shocking material that might alarm parents … the best way they could deal with the situation was by trying to understand their children and talk to them." She added that parents should think back to when they were a teenager and realise that this is the type of discussion they were having 20 years ago, it's just that now it's actually out on the Internet if they make their profiles readable by everyone." Here's the BBC's coverage.

eDonkey bites the dust - sort of

Another file-sharing service - by which people can download free but copyrighted music and other media - settled this week. "The firm behind popular online file-sharing software eDonkey has agreed to pay $30 million to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry," the Associated Press reports. The company, MetaMachine, Inc., agreed to stop distributing its eDonkey, eDonkey 2000, Overnet and other file-sharing software applications, as well as to prevent people from file-sharing with previously downloaded versions of them. MetaMachine was one of seven companies to receive warning letters from the RIAA. BearShare, i2Hub, WinMX, Grokster, and Kazaa have also settled. But the interesting thing about this story is how file-sharing is really out of these companies' hands, no matter how many lawsuits are piled on. "EDonkey has been the most popular file-sharing network the last two years, but most of the computer users tapping into the hub of linked PCs have increasingly done so using an open-source version of the eDonkey software dubbed eMule," the AP reports, citing the view from file-sharing traffic measurer BigChampagne. "Because many computer users still have functional versions of eDonkey or eMule, it's unlikely the shutdown of eDonkey's business operations will have much of an impact on people file-swapping on the eDonkey network."

Out-sourcing term papers online

I'll tell you the verdict right up front, so you can pass it on to any student you know: Don't do it, people! As tempting as it might be to have the likes of Term Paper Relief or Superior Papers do their work for them, they'd be paying good money for dreck, the New York Times found. The Times got an English professor to look at one out-sourced paper, and his response was that if he were "confronted with such a paper from one of his own students … he probably wouldn’t grade it at all but would instead say 'come see me' (shuddering at the prospect)." I suspect the student, too, would be shuddering.

Facebook to open up

Soon all people will need to sign up at Facebook is a valid email address. First they needed one ending with ".edu," then they needed to be a high school student invited in by another student; next Facebook opened up to selected networks in workplaces. The latest is that "Facebook will soon be allowing anyone with a valid email address to sign up on the site and join a regional network," USATODAY reports. "It will launch just over 500 networks in the USA and abroad." It's an entirely different development, but given members' very vocal reaction to the last new development at Facebook (the flap over its News Feed last week), it'll be interesting to see how this goes over. "Students especially have grown to see Facebook as their private homes online. And this move could make them feel like they've lost that," according to USATODAY.

Teen YouTube star quits

If you worry that young social networkers, videographers, or bloggers in your life are fixated on fame, it might help to give them the story of 18-year-old YouTube star "Emmalina" in the Sydney Morning Herald. "The chatty video blog entries recorded from her bedroom first began to appear in the 'most viewed' rankings … in June and some of her more controversial posts attracted more than 300,000 views…. Her spectacular rise to Internet fame gave rise to a multitude of YouTube dedications, spin-offs and spoofs, as well as a rap song dedicated to her popularity." But she's now an ex-YouTube star. She quit. She deleted her profile and all her videos from the site because, along with the fame and adulation came "cruel spoofs, harassing videos, death and rape threats, [and] incredibly nasty comments," she told the Morning Herald. People also hacked into her computer and stole private photos, videos, and information and posted them online. Meanwhile, there's another YouTube star who turned out to be more virtual than real. You'll see what I mean by that in the New York Times's "The Lonelygirl that Really Wasn't." In a piece published before she was "outed," the Los Angeles Times looked at the "conspiracy theories" Lonelygirl15 fueled – with insights into 21st-century marketing.

Wanted: Limited exposure

Many social networkers like their fishbowl a little cloudy, thank you. That's what they (we all) learned from Facebook's News Feed flap last week, as summed up by one user, who told the New York Times that, where their online lives were concerned, "translucent is good," transparent isn't. "Those who study social networking sites say that users’ comfort with revealing intimate details about themselves comes in part from a perception that in the din of life online, there is a kind of privacy through anonymity," the writer wrote. In other words, you're a little *more* anonymous if people have to come find your news than if it gets broadcast to all your friends as it breaks! A lot of parents will find it a relief to know that there are limits to the appeal of self-exposure on blogging and social-networking sites.

Social networking in Japan

Mixi.jp is the oldest and hottest site on Japan's blossoming social-networking scene. Having launched in February '04, its population has quintupled in the past year, and it's now the country's No. 3 site after Yahoo! Japan and Rakuten, Crossroads.com reports. But social networking's takeoff has been relatively slow in Japan, partly because phone texting is "the social standard for social communication among Japanese teenagers" and Web-based socializing has only recently been accessible by phone, and partly because of Japanese users' penchant for privacy. "An estimated 3.2 million people walk through Shinjuku station every day, but the chances of them interacting with anyone other than a travel companion are slim to none. Respect for personal space is of paramount importance in busy Tokyo…. In many ways, Japanese prefer interaction at a safe distance. This is, after all, a country where pickup lines are more often subtly typed into cell phone message windows than spoken face-to-face." The big thing in Japan, now, is social networking by interest community, either in private or narrow-interest groups on general social networks or in niche networks. You can learn a lot more about Mixi, including screenshots, at Mashable.com, with further insights into cultural differences in social networking at CNET.

Britons socializing online a lot!

Social networking is fast moving up the UK's Web traffic charts. Several of what the traffic measurers at comScore call "UGC" (for user-generated content) sites have fairly suddenly moved up into Britain's Top 50. "The top UGC property, Wikipedia Sites, ranked as the 16th most visited property in July with 6.5 million visitors (up 253% versus year ago)," comScore reports. You'll notice some familiar names now: MySpace.com (up 467% to 5.2 million visitors), Piczo.com (up 393% to 4 million visitors), YouTube.com (3.9 million visitors), and Bebo.com (up 328% to 3.9 million visitors). MySpace and Bebo were ranked 89th and 90th, respectively, in July 2005; this past July, they'd moved up to 27th and 48th.

WoW: No. 1 online game

"WoW" stands for World of Warcraft, an Irvine, Calif.-based online game that, with nearly 7 million subscribers worldwide, is expected to make more than $1 billion this year. "That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind," the New York Times reports. "Like the iPod, World of Warcraft has essentially taken over and redefined an entire product category." WoW launched less than two years ago and is now played in five languages, with a sixth in development. Unlike other US-based games, such as Grand Theft Auto, this one seems to connect with and connect people across cultural barriers. Here's one fascinating cultural difference, though it seems to be collapsing: "It is rare for guilds [in-game groups of member-characters] in North America and Europe to get together in real life, partly because of geographic distance and partly because of the social stigma often associated with gaming in the West. In Asia, however, online players … want to meet in the flesh to put a real face on the digital characters they have been having fun with. Even in the United States, more and more players are coming to see online games as a way to preserve and build human connections, even if it is mostly through a keyboard or microphone." Here's CNET on WoW, including comments from the Rob Pardo, VP game design at Blizzard, the game's creators.

Monitoring MySpacers, Part 2

Part 2 is the parenting part - the human part of monitoring young social networkers. For this week's issue of my newsletter, I interviewed Brad Weber and Michael Edelson, serial tech entrepreneurs, founders of BeNetSafe, and both dads of three between the ages of 13 and 15. Last week, we talked about the various monitoring options involving tech. I think this week's more interesting, but see if you agree! Read on. Also feel free to comment, of course: in this blog, via email, or in our forum for parents and everyone else interested in safe, constructive use of the social Web, BlogSafety.com.

FTC: Watch out, social networks!

In fining Xanga.com $1 million, more than twice any previous fine of its kind, the Federal Trade Commission sent a clear message to the social networks this week that COPPA is in force where their industry's concerned (COPPA is the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act). "The Xanga site stated that children under 13 could not join, but then allowed visitors to create Xanga accounts even if they provided a birth date indicating they were under 13," says the FTC in its press release. So at the time of its investigation, 1.7 million people had created accounts and given "birthdates" indicating they were 12 or under. The thing is, people can give their dog's birthday or the day of their first date and a Web site would never know. Xanga's response was: "Before these issues came to our attention, Xanga had in place a registration system intended to screen out underage users – reflecting our longstanding policy that no one under 13 is allowed to create an account. That system was inadequate because users were able to initially indicate that they were at least 13 years old when registering for the site, and then afterwards post a younger age on their profile. We found that an array of Xanga users created profiles with "birth dates" other than their actual day of birth when establishing their weblog. For example, pet bloggers registered with their pet's birthday, engaged bloggers registered with their wedding date…." Ironically, Xanga is barely a "social networking site." It really focuses on blogging and doesn't include social features like chat and instant messaging and doesn't allow "profile searches based on sex, age or gender." But it has shown leadership in implementing a number of safety measures, which are listed in the press release linked to above. [For the sake of full disclosure, Xanga is one of 11 companies supporting the BlogSafety forum, a Web site I co-direct.]

Facebook flap

For its users, Facebook crossed a line this week. A protest group of them called Students Against Facebook News Feed said Facebook violated user privacy rights by aggregating info users already make publicly available into a "news feed" that alerts people on their friends lists to even the smallest updates on their pages so the recipients don't have to dig around. "By late on Wednesday, more than 500,000 of Facebook's 9.5 million members had signed an online petition" against the new feature, MIT's Technology Review reported. For more tech-savvy people, this is a Web 2.0 version "push" vs. "pull" - pushing out info instead of waiting for users to be pulled in to see it - and critics using Facebook called it "creepy" or like being stalked. What makes it mainstream tech news is that 1) this is the first time social networkers themselves have spoken out about protecting their own privacy, and 2) Facebook is in the headlines instead of MySpace! Within about two days of protests, Facebook announced it would soon be giving users more control over their info (though users who had the strictest privacy settings turned on weren't in news feeds), the Washington Post reported), and on Friday announced the new features, a San Francisco Chronicle blog reported). But before mainstream news outlets picked it up, the story was in campus newspapers nationwide. Here's a sampler: at the University of Wisconsin, "Facebook users strike back"; at Indiana, "Facebook updates 'creepy'"; and at Virginia, "Don't feed the monster."

Wikis: The social side of research

A wiki is a site that aggregates content created by people all over the Web. The most famous one is Wikipedia.org. But there's a growing number of others: e.g., wikiPregnancy.com; Wikia.com, like a Wikipedia but with more arcane info; wikiHow.com, with how-to info on lots of topics; Wikitravel.org with all sorts of travelers' advice; and ShopWiki.com with product reviews. In addition to mentioning all the above, the New York Times looks at the business of hosting wikis. BTW, teachers can go to Wetpaint.com or Wiki.com to start their own classroom wikis!

Woman charged in teen boy's assault

A disturbing reminder that girls aren't the only victims of online predation: "A 23-year-old Massachusetts woman is facing a sexual assault charge involving a 15-year-old Connecticut boy she met on the Internet," WFSB TV in Hartford reported. They reportedly had "'met' online through a friend of the victim. The arrest warrant showed the two began chatting through MySpace.com and MSN Messenger," which led to cellphone conversations, the exchange of photos, and a sexual encounter in a motel. The boy's mother reportedly learned of all this when she found the two together the next day. [Det. Frank Dannahey of the Rocky Hill, Ct., Police Department pointed this story out.]

Homework helpers

It usually helps to get the lowdown from a fellow parent. Alina Tugend, parent of people in middle and elementary school, helpfully reviews homework help sites in the New York Times. After typical confusion up front, she found that "there are two main differences in online help sites — those that allow a student to interact with a tutor through instant messaging and those that provide resources and techniques to help a student figure out answers to questions." She proceeds to link to some examples in both categories. Among them is AOL's StudyBuddy.com, a search engine for students that turns up results pre-screened by teachers and librarians. The Associated Press zooms in on this service in a short review of its own. Meanwhile, here's CNET's Top 10 Sites for Students (of the college variety), which include a poker site in the "Best for Vice" category.

'Storytexting' on phones

It's a little like a soap opera for the teeny screen – that of a cellphone. Each scene in the text novella "Ghost Town" is "about 160 characters long, just enough to fit into one text message," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. The story has eight characters and "revolves around a high school football star, 'Ghost,' who has a secret. He's homeless." The characters all have backstories that subscribers can read at YouthNoise.com, a youth-activism site and online community that's a project of Save the Children. The other partners in this project are Stand Up for Kids, a nonprofit organization supporting homeless young people, and Virgin Mobile USA, providing its platform. The Star Tribune says 12,000 people have signed up to receive the novella's twice-daily "episodes" for a month, ending Sept. 15. All of the story's characters have blogs at YouthNoise and the main ones have profiles on MySpace, where readers can add them to their friends lists (illustrating how the line between fiction and real life on the social networks is never totally clear).

Social networking everywhere

You do know that MySpace is only the beginning, right? There are social sites popping up all over the place designed specifically for connecting users with - as parents would see it - "strangers," CNET reports. In the "amazing array of social-networking tools" being launched for mobile social networkers, CNET mentions "services like Dodgeball and Meetro, [which] allow you to locate and communicate with your circle of existing and potential friends within a given geographical location using text and instant messaging on a cell phone or laptop." Then there's Placesite, which "allows you to identify strangers with similar interests while surfing on your laptop and sipping a latte in your favorite cafe." CNET also mentions Nokia Sensor, Playtxt, Mamjam, and Jambo, which "facilitate flirting and interacting with strangers" wherever one is, using a cellphone-based profile and text messaging" or a profile "accessed on a variety of wireless devices." Of course, MySpace and Facebook profiles can be accessed via cellphone too (see this item last April). It's not just the social Web, it's the very mobile social Web on any device you happen to have in your hand. For context, CNET had some numbers: "Two of every three people in the United States now visit social-networking sites ... roughly 90% of young people are online, [and] more than 63% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 27 now send text messages." In related news, "police have arrested a 31-year-old Groton [Ct.] man, accusing him of setting up sexual encounters with a 14-year-old girl over the cellphone," the Associated Press reports. [Thanks to Det. Frank Dannahey at the Rocky Hill, Ct., Police Dept. for pointing this news out.]

Mini music stores at MySpace

This is great news for musicians and more bad news for Tower Records. Not only can young musicians and garage bands introduce their music to millions of fans everywhere via MySpace, now they can sell it to them too – right from their own pages. "Assuming that the songs for sale do not violate a copyright, the artist or label can set a price and allow Web users to buy songs the way they might with services such as iTunes and Yahoo Music," the Washington Post reports. Shawn Fanning, creator of the original file-sharing program Napster, is providing the technology, the Los Angeles Times reports, through his company, Snocap, Fans get a piece of the action too, quite remarkably: They can "sell their favorite bands' tracks on their own MySpace pages, with a portion of the proceeds going to the artists." The service is being tested now, with full availability by the end of the year, according to the Post. More on MySpace recently: a commentary in Associated Content on MySpace as "the new American social icon" (interesting but not entirely accurate).

Not-so-virtual advertising

Videogamers will soon be seeing – or interacting with – pretty sophisticated ads in their games. This is not the static product-placement advertising of the past, of course. These are being called "dynamic" ads "because they are built into the virtual landscape of the video games and can be updated by advertisers via the Internet," the San Jose Mercury News reports. Just as in real life, gamers will see this advertising on billboards, buses, storefronts, etc., right in the games' environments – urban, suburban, or rural, maybe on virtual TV and movie screens!

Monitoring MySpacers

The hands-down best way to find out what our kids are up to on the social Web is to ask them about it. It can also help to supplement that discussion by going online *with* them to their favorite hangouts and – again, with them - going through their friends lists, candidly telling them you check in on their profiles or blogs occasionally, because they're public spaces anyone can see and it's a parent’s job to make sure they're not doing anything to harm themselves or others physically or in terms of future academic and employment prospects. Another way to monitor social networkers is with monitoring technology - sometimes purely for convenience (though it might be better for parent-child relations to be up front about using it), sometimes because a child seems to be at risk and is not communicating with a parent. Three kinds of monitoring-with-tech are now available (so far, mostly for MySpace users): 1) human monitoring that uses technology (SafeSpacers emails parents their reports); tech monitoring (e.g., BeNetSafe and myspaceWatch) that makes monitoring teens easier and more convenient than going to their pages oneself; and 3) hard-core key-logger-style monitoring that logs every keystroke of the person using a particular computer. For more on the first two (newer) types, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Free books online

Project Gutenberg was the first supplier of free out-of-copyright books on the Web and it's more comprehensive, but Google Book Search just made things easier – at least for when it has your book of choice. "Just one click and a PDF file of the book is on your desktop," reports The Guardian. "You can then either read it online (in which case you deserve to have it free), print it out page by page or send it to a print-on-demand publishing house such as Lulu.com where it will emerge as a fully fledged paperback for less than a fiver." Project Gutenberg says it has 19,000 free books in its catalog, including the kind your kids are assigned in school. Here's Google Book Search , and here's CNET on this development.