Ultimate photo-sharing on phones

Young digital socializers will love this: sending social-network-based photos to friends' phones. CNET's CTIA (mobile phone industry trade show) blog reviews MySpace and Facebook versions. It really sounds like a 2-platform utility that gets one's media moving from phone to Web and vice versa. In this and its WebWare blog, CNET looks at this - the 3Guppies widget - which, if installed on your Facebook or MySpace profile, will allow visitors to "grab all the pictures and videos on it and send them to their own phones." It also sends music from your profile to your phone (and on to your friends), and WebAware says a user doesn't have to know much about his/her phone to use the phone version. The MySpace version, once associated with the profile owner's phone number, can automatically upload photo, video, and text from phone to profile. Photos and - to a degree - music can be edited with this little software app, CNET says, so ringtones can be created from MP3 files. Lots of convenience and potential for self-expression, here, but also a tool to be wary of for teens into online self-exposure. [Virgin Mobile has quite the ringtone-producing tool, too, CNET says in a separate review, and here's a bunch of other widget and micro-app reviews from the CTIA show at CNET.

Google & friends' face-off with Facebook

Remember when Facebook announced last spring that it plans to be the social-networking "platform" (see this )? Well, Google has created a social-networking alliance designed to give Facebook's plan a little competition. Google's Orkut plus LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, and Ning the host to individuals' own social-networking sites are "introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs" for them, the New York Times reports. According to the Associated Press, the Google platform is called "OpenSocial." Since Facebook's announcement in May, the Times says, "more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a 'news feed' that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing." Those social-networking features enable "viral marketing," seen by marketers as a much more powerful because much more targeted means of getting an advertising message across. The TechCrunch blog discuss how Facebook's version, SocialAds, works is doing it: The site is "experimenting with targeting ads on its own site (through its Facebook Flyers program) based on demographic and psychographic data that it culls from members’ profiles. With SocialAds, it will be able to extend that targeting across the Web." [Here's this story from the UK-based Financial Times, as well as the FT's big-picture piece on how the social Web has really taken off.]

Meanwhile, as viral, psychographic-based marketing takes off too, it'll be interesting to see how Facebook and the Google alliance explain to members and parents what privacy-protection options come with this next phase of social-Web advertising. The Financial Times later added a bit on MySpace's plans for "hyper-targeted, behavioral advertising." [Speaking of which, nine consumer organizations have banded together to ask the Federal Trade Commission "to provide needed consumer protections in the behavioral advertising sector" by, among other things, creating a "Do Not Track" list like the "Do Not Call" list already in place, the Center for Democracy & Technology announced today, Oct. 31.]

New mobile 'social networks'

This is "the year of social networks" for cellphones, CNET reported in its coverage of last week's mobile-phone-industry trade show. So it reviews five "shiny, new" examples: Bluepulse, a social service really just for phones (looks bad on a desktop); UK-based Trutap, which is "more a mobile facilitator than pure mobile social network"; Utterz, which is more about "pushing mobile-generated content to the Web" (photos, video, audio comments you make, and of course text); and Whrrl and Rummble, facilitators of socializing in person (using GPS or geo-location tech. These, however, are merely five drops in an ocean of socially oriented services targeting the cellphone platform. To get a feel for sheer numbers, see a librarian's list of dozens last March (some of these startups may've folded by now). I separately just heard about another one: SpinVox. With "voice-to-screen" as its tagline, it says it "seamlessly marries the mobile and online realms" by converting a voice message to a text one, then sends it to one friend, many friends, a blog, or a profile (see SpinVox.com).

How YouTube stardom works

Of course "stardom" on the social Web is different from mass-media stardom. Take bands in MySpace, for example - fame is more dispersed but intimate. Artists are closer to their fans, who do the real marketing (in a "viral," word-of-mouth way that has a lot more influence than the polished but less personal marketing of a record label). Income is different too - coming in more in piecemeal fashion over time - but a living can be made, sometimes after big media companies or agents notice an artist's amazing fan base. So, it appears, will it go for two funny guys in Madison, Wisc. Their eight-part series "Chad Vader: Day-Shift Manager" is one of YouTube's "biggest hits, having been viewed more than 19 million times since its debut in July 2006" and this year they, Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda, were "among the first performers recruited by YouTube’s new professional partnership program, paying content providers a portion of the site’s ad revenue," the New York Times reports. But a key takeaway - if your child has aspirations of YouTube stardom - is "don't try it for the money," which seems to describe Matt and Aaron, according to Times writer David Callender. Check out the article to see why.

Parents on kids' Net use: Study

We're a little more ambivalent about our children's Net use than we used to be - but that doesn't mean more of us think the Internet is bad for them, according to a just-released study on this by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"While a majority of [US] parents with online teens [12-17] still believe the Internet is a beneficial factor in their children's lives, there has been a decrease since 2004" in the number of parents who believe so (67% then vs. 59% now), study author Alexandra Rankin Macgill reports. She adds, though, that there has not been a "corresponding increase" during the same period in the percentage of parents who see online activity as a bad thing (7% now vs. 5% then). "Instead, more parents are neutral about whether their children have been positively affected by the Internet, saying the Internet has not had an effect on their child one way or another [30% now vs. 25% then]." ["Now" should be qualified a bit, because the survey was conducted about a year ago.]

As for how we regulate our kids' Internet use, interestingly, as with videogames and TV, we tend to do so in terms of the content of the medium more than time spent on it - 68% have rules about what sites their kids can use, compared to 77% concerning TV shows they can watch and 67% concerning videogames they can play. So we're pretty engaged in their Net use - "despite the stereotype of the clueless parent," Pew/Internet found. Some 65% of parents say they've checked where their kids have been after they've been online, and "74% can correctly identify" whether their children have created a social-networking profile others can see.

There's a fairly predictable difference between teens' favorable view of technology and that of parents, though the percentage of parents with a positive view is high: 71% of parents say the Internet and cellphones, iPods and digital cameras make their lives easier, compared to 89% of teens. I noted with interest that 63% of US 12-to-17-year-olds now have cellphones, compared to 89% of parents. For iPods and other music players, it's the inverse: 51% of teens have them, compared to 29% of parents.

Related links

A pdf version of the full 6-page report is linked to here.

The headlines on this report from Pew/Internet ranged from "The Net is a bad influence" from a Fox TV news station in Indiana to the Associated Press's "Parents more ambivalent about Net."

In a closer, more local look at attitudes about the Net, the Orlando Sentinel found them "more nuanced" on the part of both teens and parents.

Parental concerns key

eMarketer points out how important parents' views of social networking are to this social-Web business. It cites the research of Parks Associates as showing that "virtual world advertising in the United States will increase tenfold to $150 million by 2012 from the 2006 level. That spending could be cut, however, if parents deny permission for teens to visit virtual worlds. And parental approval is not a given, since some aspects of virtual worlds are still discomfiting for parents." What Mattel's BarbieGirls.com does is require girls to pick a username, password, and age range ("the choices are 5 or under, 6-7, 8-9, 10-12, 13-15 and 16+"). The also have to provide a parent's email address, "which is used to send an automated permission request. Once the parent approves, a child can access the site." Of course kids can find workarounds: It's impossible to verify that the email address really is the child's parent's, and the message "simply asks the recipient to affirm 'that you are the parent of the child')." And proof of the child's age can't be required because children don't have ID cards or personal information in any national database against which sites could check (a scary thought - see this on child age verification). [eMarketer this fall issued a very expensive lengthy report on kids' virtual worlds.]

Social networker age verification revisited

Parents often ask us why on Earth social-networking sites can't just block teens altogether - verify their ages or something? After all, it's all over the US news media that attorneys general are calling for age verification. Well, we have been replying for months that it just wouldn't work (e.g., see "Verifying kids' ages: Key question for parents"). But don't take it from us this time. The UK-based Financial Times has an editorial on this saying the exact same thing. Why wouldn't it work? "The practical problems are considerable. Fourteen-year-olds do not have drivers’ licences and credit cards that can be checked via established agencies. The sites could insist on verifying the parents, but anyone who believes that a teenager will not 'borrow' his father’s Visa has never been 14 years old." Also, think about how hard it is accurately to verify kids' ages in person, at the door of a nightclub, much less over the anonymous Internet with no physical evidence or view of the person's face.

And then what would the result be? "The consequences of successful age verification, meanwhile, would be even worse," the FT continues. "Minors would be driven off mainstream sites such as MySpace and Facebook and on to unaccountable offshore alternatives or the chaos of newsgroups," which we tell parents all the time - because kids are experts at finding workarounds. "There they would be far more vulnerable than on MySpace, which now makes efforts to keep tabs on its users." In other words, parents probably want their kids in sites that have customer service departments that actually respond to abuse reports and parents' complaints. MySpace has an email address just for parents (parentcare@myspace.com), as well as ones for educators and law enforcement. [For more on age verification, see a blog post from Adam Thierer of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, complete with a podcast he did with other experts on the issue. The FT also this week published a summary on where social-networking sites, attorneys general, and all the rest of are on all this.]

US sites, foreign social networking

When the user-driven social Web meets the fairly evolved consumer-privacy and free-speech laws of the US (where many social-networking sites are based) meets the laws and sensibilities of the country where the US company's customers are, things get complicated. And very messy, sometimes. Take Brazil, for example. There, Google's social-networking site Orkut.com "has become a major center of Brazilian social life, with two-thirds of all Internet surfers using the service, many of them children, the Wall Street Journal reports. And some of them criminals. While many Orkut "communities were built around such themes as soccer, love and overcoming injustice" (almost 400,000 people are members of a group called "My mother is the best on Earth"), "criminal elements also connected with each other and recruited sympathizers on the site, including neo-Nazis, organized gangs and pedophiles." So early on, in its zeal to protect its users' free speech and privacy, Google was much less responsive to Brazilian users' complaints and law-enforcement subpoenas than some prosecutors - and potential advertisers - in Brazil found satisfactory. Thus the story of how one country - and its watchdogs, in the business community and children's advocacy - is dealing with the social Web, an interesting case study for everyone interested in this intersection of law enforcement, civil liberties, and the social Web.

Microsoft's moves in social space

More obvious this week were Microsoft's plans for the social Web both mobile and fixed. CEO Steve Ballmer said in a keynote at the mobile phone industry's (CTIA's) big fall 2007 trade show in San Francisco that the mobile phone is becoming "the universal remote control for your life" (see this CNET blog post). That's becoming true especially for teenagers, who already move fluidly from computer to phone to "real life" when they socialize, whether they're talking, texting, blogging, commenting, or sharing music, photos and video - and mobiles are simply the most handy, portable device to enable all that social self-expression. Microsoft right now appears to be focusing more on the business ("enterprise") mobile market, but it certainly gets the importance of mobile devices going forward. The company also announced this week it would pay $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, beating out similar bids from Yahoo and Google. This probably won't affect young Facebook users much. It just says something about the current value and possible staying power of social networking on the Web. "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg looks prescient for refusing to sell the Palo Alto startup to Yahoo for an estimated $1 billion last year. Wednesday's deal sets the worth of the 23-year-old, who owns a 20 percent share, at an estimated $3 billion," the Chronicle adds.

Social-networking sights on Asia

There's a "colossal scrum among the world's biggest social networks for the hearts and mouse clicks of millions of people in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia," Business Week reports. It adds that MySpace and Facebook are scrambling to replace "established homegrown networks and foreign sites, especially Orkut and Friendster" (Orkut has a well-established beachhead in India, which also has at least a dozen "homegrown" social sites, and Friendster in Southeast Asia). MSNBC reports that "MySpace began rolling out local language sites about a year and a half ago and now has 24 in 20 countries, in 12 languages, including French, German and Japanese," though France-based Skyrock has about 70% of that country's social-networking market. " In Poland, local site Grono.net has a strong following, with more than 1.3m registered users. In Russia, LiveJournal, a San Francisco-based blogging site, has a strong following, and Yandex, a local company that dominates the country's internet search market, far overshadowing Google, owns its own social networking site, MoiKrug.ru."

Oz kids: Pros on Web

Most Australian children go online for the first time between the ages of 5 and 10 and quickly become Net regulars, "with two-thirds of children logging on from home at least twice a week and 43% doing so daily," Australian IT reports, citing a new report from Nielsen/NetRatings. Nearly half of Australians 6-17 are online daily, the study also found. Older teens "are wedded to the world of Wikipedia, email and social networking, with 75% of those aged 15 to 17 going online daily for study and to chat with friends." Adults with children are likely to be more Net-literate than those without, and parents have "a high level of trust" in the way their kids are managing their personal info online, according to Nielsen. On a recent visit to Oz, author and pundit Howard Rheingold had some thoughts for parents, recorded in the Sydney Morning Herald. And brace yourselves, fellow parents Down Under: video-sharing just got more convenient and local for your kids; YouTube launched its Australian site, Australian IT reports that YouTube just launched its Australian site.

Kids' screen time

Nearly half of US parents say their kids watch too much TV and "about a third of parents believe the Internet sucks up too much of their child's time," CNET reports. Where the Net's concerned, how much time is that? "More than three-quarters of Americans age 12 and older spend about 8.9 hours online per week, up about an hour from a 2005 study from the USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project," CNET says. "But young people, specifically ages 8 to 18, spend about an hour on the computer and 49 minutes playing video games per day, according to the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation." The article cites the view of CommonSenseMedia.org founder Jim Steyer that the need is for engaged parents promoting balance among all of a children's activities, on screen and off (see Common Sense's "Tips for a Healthy Media Diet for Young Kids").

Family PC purchase decisions

There's help from the Wall Street Journal, where tech writer Walt Mossberg says people who prefer Windows XP can still get it on some new PCs (e.g., Dells), and there's reason to do so. He offers a host of tips on what to look for in purchasing any PC or laptop, from OS to hard drive to memory to the benefits of buying home vs. business computers.

Teen privacy: New standards?

It seems self-exposure, or assertively forgoing privacy, is for teens "as natural as brushing their teeth," writes Janet Kornblum of USATODAY. They seek feedback on themselves constantly, Janet quotes one expert as saying. Another told her that teens understand privacy but simply choose to be "out there" because that's how things happen. It's about marketing. Or just staying in touch, which outweighs the potential downside (reputation issues). So they just develop a thicker skin and/or learn how to manage their public persona (see "Online spin control").

New platform for self-exposure

Consider the privacy issue in light of the social networking that's becoming increasingly common on and with cellphones. "Almost 55% of all mobile phones sold today in the United States have the [GPS] technology that makes friend-and- family-tracking services possible," the New York Times reports, zooming in on one such service, loopt. In another article, it reports that Google has just acquired phone-based "micro-blogging" service Jaiku in Finland. The article talks about the potential for 24/7 "live diaries," which doesn't sound that different from a Web-based social-networking profile or blog; it merely provides a new platform for teenage self-exposure. Jaiku says it's trying to strike a balance between giving users privacy options and the convenience they seem to expect. The problem is, as an executive told the Times, a lot of people have this illusion that they enjoy privacy when they actually don't. I suspect that's even more true with teens if they even care about privacy - they err on the side of believing their privacy's protected. Jaiku told the Times it "extracts a lot of information automatically" from user's phones - something for parents, online-safety advocates, and policymakers to think seriously about. [Last month Google bought mobile-social-networking startup Zingku last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reports in "Mobile social networking taking off," which also mentions phone-based photo-sharing services Radar and Zannel. Photo-sharing is another favorite social activity among teens and 20-somethings.]

[We'd love to hear your views on and experiences with any of the above in our parent-and-teen forum, ConnectSafely.org.]

Copyright protction on social Web: Latest

If your child loves creating his or her own music, ski, or skateboard videos or mixing others' footage and music into new mashups, that is really cool. But now would be a good time to talk with him or her about how Web sites are getting more strict about protecting copyrights. A handful of very large media and social-Web companies have created a coalition designed to protect copyrights on sites such as MySpace, the Associated Press reports. YouTube would logically be one of them but didn't join the coalition, possibly because of Viacom's lawsuit against it; it did, however just announce its own copyright protection plan (more on that in a moment). The coalition announced some copyright-protection guidelines for the industry to follow, including 1) having in place by the end of the year "filtering software that blocks all content media companies flag as being unauthorized," 2) keeping the filters up to date, and 3) "cooperation between media and Web companies to allow 'wholly original' user-generated videos to be posted and to accommodate 'fair use' of copyrighted material as allowed under law. Coalition members include Disney, Viacom, CBS, NBC, and News Corp. on the media side and Microsoft, MySpace (whose parent is News Corp.), Veoh Networks and Dailymotion on the Web side. YouTube's new copyright-protection system employs "software to find unique characteristics in the clips so it can detect copies posted by YouTube users without permission," the Los Angeles Times reports. "Media companies can ask Google to automatically delete every unauthorized copy - or to slap ads on the clips and promote them." Both the AP and the L.A. Times said neither the new coalition nor YouTube have as yet defined "fair use," though both said fair use of copyrighted material would be allowed. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, interest in watching TV shows on the Web is growing. "This week, two research organizations, TNS and the Conference Board, issued a report indicating that the number of people who watch TV shows online has doubled in the last year," the New York Times reports.

Kids' virtual worlds hot

There's a mini boom of kids' virtual world afoot, CNET reports, probably fueled the success of Webkinz and Neopets and Disney's acquisition of ClubPenguin. One reason: "more kids are flocking to imaginative, character-driven environments. An expected 53% of children on the Web will belong to a virtual world within four years, more than doubling the current population of 8.2 million members," reports CNET citing eMarketer figures. Other worlds and services CNET mentions are WebbliWorld.com from the creators of Wallace & Gromit, GaiaOnline.com, Stardoll.com, and Nickelodeon's Nicktropolis. I would add Whyville.net as another prominent one, and possible Finland-based Habbo.com, though it probably skews slightly older. A related CNET article asks, "Are kids ready for ads in such spaces?". Since this interactive advertising goes well beyond cereal boxes and TV spots to immersive games and other forms of direct involvement for children, it's a good question to ask.

ICACs in all 50 states

There will soon be Internet Crimes Against Children task forces in every US state, TechnologyNewsDaily.com reports. "The Department of Justice announced that 13 new state and local law enforcement agencies will receive more than $3 million" to form the task forces in Alaska, California, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.

Thais arrest child abuse suspect

Last week, in an unprecedented move, Interpol went public in its search for a child pornography suspect, and this week, with the help of leads that came in as a result, the man identified and arrested. Here's the AP's story about the arrest. Christopher Paul Neil is a 32-year-old Canadian schoolteacher, the Associated Press reported earlier. "Thai authorities issued an arrest warrant Thursday for a Canadian who is the subject of a global Interpol manhunt for the alleged sexual abuse of at least a dozen Cambodian and Vietnamese boys, some as young as 6, police said."

Facebook's safety agreement

In a settlement it has reached with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Facebook will now be replying to "the most serious complaints" by users about porn and unwelcome contacts within 24 hours, its chief security officer Chris Kelly told CBS News technology analyst Larry Magid in an audio interview. In its coverage, the Associated Press says Facebook also agreed to "report to the complainant within 72 hours on how it will respond" to the complaint. In addition, Facebook will hire an outside company approved by the attorney general's office to monitor its level of response to complaints and has updated its safety information pages focusing especially on info for parents. Kelly told Larry, who is also my co-director at ConnectSafely.org, that Facebook is now encouraging users to report to a parent or trusted adult as well as Facebook when things come up. The settlement ends General Cuomo's investigation of Facebook, during which he said Facebook was falsely advertising as a safer social-networking site. Though it started at Harvard and for a while focused solely on college and university users, Facebook now has some 47 million members of all ages, the New York Times reports. Here, too, is CNET.

Teens & stranger contact: New study

Researcher Aaron Smith likens the Internet to a park, mall, or any other public space, where most of teens' encounters with others are fine, but some can be scary or risky. "Just 7% of online teens have ever had an interaction with a stranger that made them feel scared or uncomfortable," though nearly a third (32%) "have been contacted by someone with no connection to them or any of their friends," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's press material about Aaron's data memo (and Pew's latest study).

The uncomfortable contacts - which the study found girls have more than boys - aren't terribly surprising, the study says, however, since a full 49% of social-networking teens "use these sites to make new friends." Also not surprising, the Associated Press's coverage suggests, "because Pew counts as 'stranger contacts' comments left on photo-sharing sites and requests to become friends at social-networking sites." It just may be the case, Aaron adds, that teens "see some level of unwanted contact as a known downside" of social networking - "a relatively minor 'cost of doing business' in this environment."

The behaviors the Pew study found to be "associated with high levels of online stranger contact" are: having a social-networking profile, posting photos online, and using social sites to flirt.

Parents, you may want to note that it's the child's intention that is key, here. The study found that "teens who use social-networking sites to flirt are more likely to be contacted by people they don't know … although a similar effect is not seen in teens who use social-networking sites to make new friends." This finding is consistent with another emerging fact in online-safety research - that it's the teens who are seeking out risk in life in general who are more at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim").

Interestingly (and consistent, it appears to me, with research at the Crimes Against Children Research Center - see "New approach to safety education suggested"), Pew found that "there is no consistent association between stranger contact and the types of information posted in a profile" (e.g., first or last name, school name, email address) and "no statistically significant association between stranger contact and having a public profile (letting everyone see your profile instead of just friends).

The study also found that despite the media attention social sites have drawn, they aren't the sole source of uncomfortable online encounters. Aaron wrote that "despite popular concerns about teens and social networking, our analysis suggests that social networking sites are not inherently more inviting to scary or uncomfortable contacts than other online activities."

One other key point parents may find interesting: Monitoring software on computers teens use at home "seems to be more effective than filtering software in limited contact with strangers online," the study found. In his analysis Aaron later points out that that may be because parents who install monitoring software tend to be more engaged in their kids' online experiences than those who install filtering (teens know many workarounds for accessing blocked sites, whether via proxy servers or connecting outside the home).

Related links

The page with a link to the full, four-page data memo, "Teens and Online Stranger Contact," in pdf format.

"Online victimization: Facts emerging"

"Social-networking dangers in perspective"

"Profile of a teen online victim"

"New approach to safety education suggested"

Fraud potential on social Web

Teens aren't the only people who need to watch what personal information they upload to social Web sites. "Nearly one in three [31%] social networkers on sites such as Facebook and Friends Reunited risk becoming victims of identity fraud because they are negligent with their personal details," reports the Motley Fool, "making them a prime target for phishing and other ID fraud." What happens is that phishers (online cons) send emails to they harvest from sites of all kinds (not just social-networking ones). The emails look like they're from a person's bank, Paypal, credit card company, or even a porn provider, and they try to trick victims into clicking to a Web site that can upload malicious code to your computer or further trick them into giving personal info like social security or credit card numbers. The Fool was citing research by Equifax, which also found that, "of the 739 people polled (a relatively small survey, but it still has some significant figures), 87% published their full names and 38% their dates of birth, with more than a quarter offering their education and work details." Three key take-aways would make for great family discussion: Everybody needs to 1) select the right privacy and safety features for their particular needs (e.g., only friends can view one's full profile); 2) be really careful about the links they click on in other social networkers' profiles (they could link to malicious sites); and 3) everybody needs to check out the providers of the widgets and other code they paste into their profiles (is the source legit or potentially malicious?). [See also network-security news site DarkReading.com's comparison of potential personal and network vulnerabilities in MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.]

'Puters top holiday wish lists

I thought it was the iPod. Nope, cancel that. It was clothes that topped Americans' wish lists last year, "followed by peace and happiness, money and then computers," the Associated Press reports, citing the annual Consumer Electronics Association survey. This year it's computers. "The machines that feed us infinite and instant information, store our digital memories, give us hours of fun with games, videos or music — and help us do our taxes — outrank peace, happiness and clothes this year as the most wished-for gifts, according to an annual US survey by the consumer electronics industry's largest trade organization." But gosh I wish peace was still a top priority; I imagine it is in other parts of the world! I was right, however, about MP3 players (tho' not the iPod specifically, apparently). In the "specific gizmos" category, portable music players will top the list in 2007 for the third year in a row.

Int'l social-networking numbers

More than half (56%) of Europe's online population is social networking, and 78% of Britain's is, TechnologyNewsDaily reports, citing comScore figures. So Europe has 127.3 million social networkers and the UK 24.9 million. In addition to higher uptake, Britain's usage was heavier "in terms of hours spent, pages viewed, and the number of visits per month. The average visitor to social networking sites in the U.K. spent 5.8 hours per month on those sites in August and made 23.3 visits. This was a significantly heavier usage level than in France, which averaged 2 hours per month and 16.8 visits per visitor, or Germany, with 3.1 hours per month and 13.8 visits per visitor." Then again, compare Briton's 5.8 hours to Brazilians' 11.7 hours and Canadians' 6.5 hours, as reported by The Telegraph. It adds that the UK's top three sites are Bebo, MySpace, and Facebook, in that order.

Local social networking

Sites like Bebo, MySpace, and Facebook aggregate people from all over the world - they're more about interest community than geographic community. Niche social-networking sites zooming in on narrower and narrower interests are popping up all over the place. Another trend is increasingly focused geographic community online. It has several forms: MySpace's sites for individual countries, "home-grown" sites such as LunarStorm in Sweden and Mixi in Japan, and now sites as local as individual cities. Examples of that last category is Yelp.com in the US and the UK's welovelocal.com, just launched in London, with other UK cities coming soon. It's pretty smart - taking those searchable databases of local businesses of Web 1.0 days and putting them in the context of online community that allows people to make and share recommendations. They mashed up those attributes with Google Maps, so the user can actually find the business being recommended. Another twist is applying social networking to both interest and geographic community. PC World reports on and links to sites that help solo travelers find compatible people to sit next to on airplanes, friendly couches to sleep on in distant cities, and cheap rides from the airport in expensive cities.

Social mapping gaining momentum

People in the mobile business are calling the latest handset (as they call it in Europe) "the Swiss Army phone," and that all-purpose phone necessarily includes GPS pinpointing of the user's location. Two big stories in this space are Nokia's acquisition of "map and navigational software maker Navteq for $8.1 billion," Nokia's biggest acquisition to date, the New York Times reports, and Google's acquisition of Jaiku (ITworld.com reports). The Times says Nokia's move "is an indication of where Nokia and other handset makers are headed." To them the important part is revenue from advertisers who can, with GPS, aim their ads not just with demographic precision but now with geographic precision (walking by a pizza shop, see an ad on your phone screen beckoning you in! (That's a bit of an exaggeration, but I can tell you from first-hand travel experience of late that it might be a little less annoying than having salespeople on the sidewalk coaxing you inside as you walk by.) Anyway, precision advertising is the issue for mobile operators (and cellphone makers moving from products to services), while geo-positioning is the issue to parents and child advocates. GPS-enabled social mapping needs careful thought where minors are concerned, and some companies are giving serious thought to it. "Social mapping" - a phrase coined by loopt, a provider of this GPS-enabled social networking - means friends (and hopefully just friends made in "real life") can find out each other's physical location for getting together in person. Another example is Helio's Buddy Beacon (see this earlier story in the New York Times).

As for phone-enabled social networking on the Web (adding voice communications to profiles and blogs), see these press releases about Jaxtr and Jangl. And here's the Wall Street Journal on parental controls for mobile phones.

Keeping kids' phone bills down

"Australia has one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership in the developed world among children," the Sydney Morning Herald reports, so its Communications and Media Authority issued some tips to help keep kids' cellphone costs under control. Developed with the help of London-based Childnet International, suggestions include considering pre-paid phone services with built-in limits, using providers that track use between billing periods, using services that block extras like Internet access. For more suggestions, see "Ask these questions first" at the bottom of the Morning Herald article. The paper cites one expert as saying this can be a good opportunity for early family discussions about budgeting time and money. Children as young as five have mobiles in Australia.

Mobile socializing via MP3 player

There's another kind of mobile social networking developing - mobile but not on phones. For Microsoft, it's about socializing around music, and it's aimed at the iPod market but will also have some things in common with MySpace music community and iLike in Facebook, which of course are also giant competitors. Stiff competition, but a worthy idea, analysts are saying. "Along with the three new Zune players, including Microsoft's first-ever flash-based model, Microsoft announced a new community site dubbed Zune Social that it will fire up as beta in November," PC World reports. "According to Microsoft, Zune owners can automatically share their current playlists with friends using a Zune-to-Zune Social sync." The syncing involves user profiles called "Zune Cards." Users view each other's Cards and play samples of the Card owner's favorite tunes, which they can then go buy in the Zune MarketPlace online music store.

Family computing for a cause

It's a new twist on buy one, get one free. You buy a laptop for a child in a developing country and your child gets one free. The project is called “Give 1 Get 1,” and with it, "Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399," the New York Times reports. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. Long in development, the One Laptop per Child campaign is "an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children," according to the Times. And there have been some successes in getting laptops to their intended owners - e.g., Peru "will buy and distribute 250,000 of the laptops over the next year — many of them allocated for remote rural areas," and the Italian government "has agreed to purchase 50,000 laptops for distribution in Ethiopia."

Miss America's browser for kids

As Miss America, Lauren Nelson made online safety her cause because of a scary experience she and some friends had as young teens seven years ago when they were messing around in a Web chatroom during a sleepover. Someone in the chatroom as for one of the girls' personal information and "within a week, an online predator was emailing one of them lurid photos," the Associated Press reports. Now Lauren's the star of "The Miss America Kid-Safe Web Browser." The browser, which can be downloaded for free at MissAmericaKids.com, "permits access to 10,318 Web sites, all of which were prescreened and determined to be kid-friendly by the Miss America Organization and the Children's Educational Network, which developed the software for it. It has a feature enabling parents to lock the computer and prohibit Internet access with any other browser, and it lets parents add sites to the approved list." Other safe browsers can be found via GetNetWise.org's searchable parental-controls database (browser search results here). Here's The Telegraph's coverage of Miss America's browser from London.

Parents exposed in social sites

Kids talking about parents online can be good and bad. Some parents deserve more privacy, but the behavior of others should be exposed. Cases in point, reported by SmartMoney.com: A mom in Oregon arrested "for buying a keg of beer for her son's 17th birthday party, after the boy posted photos of the festivities on his MySpace page; a dad who lost his job after his daughter blogged about his "drinking a lot because of his boss, whom he considered a 'jerk'"; and a couple in Maryland facing trial for child abuse after their 12-year-old daughter posted in MySpace about their giving her pot and cocaine. In any case, it's not just teens' reputations that are at stake on the social Web.

Social networking for avatars

If people feel like a little extra layer of anonymity in their social networking, they can always have their avatars socialize for them. "Koinup.com is a social-networking site akin to MySpace, but for virtual worlds such as SL, IMVU, and The Sims," reports SecondLifeInsider.com. "There are a few such sites, but most of them are devoted to a particular platform, rather than the all-inclusive Koinup." Meanwhile, CNN has the big picture on social-networking niches.

Videogaming reduces a gender difference

University of Toronto researchers not only found that there's a "spatial attention" difference between men and women, but also that women can catch up to men in this ability rapidly to switch attention among different objects by playing videogames "for only a few hours." "One important application of this research could be in helping to attract more women to the mathematical sciences and engineering - since spatial skills play an important role in these professions," the university's news site quotes Prof. Ian Spence as saying. While we're on the subject, don't miss a thoughtful piece in the New York Times about what needs to happen before videogames are an art form on the level of film. "If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay — giving players challenges to work through and choices to make — in entirely new ways…. Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player’s desire for mastery in favor of enhancing the player’s emotional and intellectual life."

Young fashionistas online

Donna Karan's DKNY line and Sephora, the cosmetics store chain, will now be featured on the digital paperdolls site Stardoll.com. "Stardoll's rapidly growing Web site has a large audience of teen girls [6 million monthly visitors] who create Internet personas of themselves and spend hours dressing them up in fantasy costumes and socializing," Reuters reports. Before this they had to put up with fictional fashion labels. Though the clothing costs less in virtual life, there is a real-life cost: "Members pay $1 in US currency for 10 'star dollars' to spend on the site, and a virtual DKNY outfit of cargo pants, sequined tank top and pair of booties would cost 31 star dollars."

Cyberbullying ed: 'Adina's Deck'

Childnet's video is for everybody, including teens. "Adina's Deck" is for girls 9-14. It's "a 30-minute interactive 'choose your own adventure' television pilot series" starring four tech-literate girls who have either been cyberbullies or victims and who "use their experiences to help solve their peers' Internet mysteries." It's also a parent/teachers guide to educating middle-school students about cyberbullying. It was created by Stanford University graduate student Debbie Heimowitz and based on her research this year at two Bay Area middle schools. One of her key findings is that "there is a significant knowledge gap between the concepts of virtual identity and real-life consequences."

The bystander factor

When people hear about cyberbullying, they usually think of either the bully or the victim. But as we think together about how to deal with this problem (victimizing about a third of all US 12-to-17-year-old Net users and 22% of British teens*), it would be good to consider the third category of participant (yes, participant): the bystander.

On the Internet, there are a lot more "bystanders" when the bully can put mean text, photos and video in front entire peer groups or schools all at once, greatly compounding the victimization. Then there's the viral kind of bullying, when mean statements get passed along, IM'ed, cut-'n'-pasted by bystanders who suddenly become accessories to the bullying.

"Helping children to understand that they can make someone else suffer by swapping photos or commenting on video clips, and that a 'harmless bit of fun' to one person could be agonising humiliation for someone else, is really important," writes commentator Bill Thompson at the BBC, pointing to a new anti-cyberbullying program of the UK government's Department for Children, Schools and Families, written by Childnet International. Thompson writes that the program "shows how seriously the problem is being taken, and that may make it easier for children to tell someone about what is happening…. As with physical bullying, the first step to resolving the problem is to admit that it is happening and find someone who can help you take the next step."

[* The US cyberbullying numbers above were from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the UK ones were cited by Childnet International.]

What does cyberbullying look like?

Please take a look. We hear the word, and sometimes a definition - the online version of the nasty, mostly pre-adolescent behavior that's been making kids miserable for eons. But, to many adults, cyberbullying is pretty murky. With this new video, "Let's Fight It Together," Childnet International brings the picture into sharp focus (watch Childnet CEO Stephen Carrick-Davies on video explaining why a clear picture is so important).

The video is part of the London-based nonprofit organization's Digizen.org project. Like NetFamilyNews.org and ConnectSafely.org, Childnet, our sister organization, believes that "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It’s about building safe spaces and communities, understanding how to manage personal information, and about being Internet savvy - using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same," Childnet has on the project's About page. To do that, we all - youth, parents, educators, advocates - need to understand the problems as well as the positives of digital media and the Internet.

Though produced in the UK with British actors, "Let's Fight It Together" has universal relevance, and I hope it will fuel broad discussion in many countries.

NJ AG's 'Report Abuse' button

New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram wants all social-networking sites to have the "Report Abuse" button at the bottom of every page, NJ.com reports. Her plan, she told a Gannett New Jersey reporter, "will give users a standard form to report concerns such as suspected child predators or violent or sexually explicit material. Anyone who files a complaint will receive a confirmation number and contact information they can use to follow up on their report." New Jersey-based myYearbook.com and six niche sites run by CommunityConnect have adopted General Milgram's program so far. At first glance, it makes a lot of sense, but there are some key drawbacks: this is the program of a single US state, and social-networking sites are highly international; a number of sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and Hi5, already have such systems in place; and, practically speaking, it's not a hot button that makes sites responsive, it's the customer-service system behind it that does. A better idea would be industry-wide, uniform best practices for abuse reporting and response to which all such sites agree to comply. But let's hear from a social site itself about this. Gannett reported that MySpace hadn't returned its call about this, so I contacted MySpace as to whether this program would make sense for its service and social sites in general. Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's (and Fox Interactive's) chief security officer responded that….

MySpace already has a report abuse button "on the bottom of every profile and in key areas of our site."

MySpace's system is more granular ("users can choose the type of problem they are reporting).

"These reports are then handled by a trained customer-care group - each company is unique with a unique user base and set of issues."

"We are an international site that must handle reports from citizens around the world - a New Jersey-centric button fails to recognize the reality of the Internet" (it's in more than a dozen countries; see also "MySpace international").

"A singular process doesn't work - guiding principles in this area would be more successful rather than prescriptive requirements."

Mr. Nigam added that MySpace wasn't contacted by the New Jersey attorney general's office about the program - the company first heard about it in the news media. In related news, General Milgram's office this week subpoenaed Facebook, "requesting that the company turn over information as to whether registered sex offenders have profiles on the site," CNET reports. MySpace has responded to similar subpoenas in recent months (see "Social-networking dangers in perspective").

Kwame's mobile social networking

Former Yahoo engineer-designer Kwame Ferreira compares the current mobilizing of social networking to when cavepeople discovered that the fires over which they'd do their social networking could actually be taken from cave to cave with them, as described in the mobileCampLondon blog. Picture fire-enabled social networking on the fly. So these days, we have online social networking, which has gone from newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat to Web chatrooms and discussion boards to social-networking sites currently moving on to the phone (e.g., see PC World on Google's acquisition of mobile-socializing company Zingku, and T-Mobile just joined Helio and AT&T in providing MySpace Mobile, Red Herring reports). So we're seeing the move from accessing Web-based social networking with our phones to phone-based social networking (mobile phone-enabled instead of mobile fire-enabled). But that's not the ultimate to Kwame. "What’s the killer app? Well, one that marries the two: crossing Web and mobile data and allowing it to integrate with 'real life'" - the blogger describes something kind of like being able to see each other's social-networking profile (with their permission) in real life, while walking around. It sounds more akin to the current GPS-enabled mobile social networking we're seeing with loopt.com, by which friends (hopefully not strangers) can pinpoint each other's physical locations with their phones for real-life socializing. This is GPS-enhanced mobile-enabled social networking more than phone-based social networking, because it gets people together in person, but not Kwame's killer app yet because it generally gets together people who already know each other. It doesn't so much introduce people to each other before they get-together in a physical location. See the difference? If not, your kids probably do - I hope they're willing to explain. [See also the Boston Globe on "social networking breaking free from the PC."]

Kwame's mobile social networking

Former Yahoo engineer-designer Kwame Ferreira compares the current mobilizing of social networking to when cavepeople discovered that the fires over which they'd do their social networking could actually be taken from cave to cave with them, as described in the mobileCampLondon blog . Picture fire-enabled social networking on the fly. So these days, we have *online* social networking, which has gone from newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat to Web chatrooms and discussion boards to social-networking sites currently moving on to the phone (e.g., see PC World on Google's acquisition of mobile-socializing company Zingku , and T-Mobile just joined Helio and AT&T in providing MySpace Mobile, Red Herring reports ). So we're seeing the move from accessing Web-based social networking with our phones to phone-based social networking (mobile phone-enabled instead of mobile fire-enabled). But that's not the ultimate to Kwame. "What’s the killer app? Well, one that marries the two: crossing Web and mobile data and allowing it to integrate with 'real life'" - the blogger describes something kind of like being able to see each other's social-networking profile (with their permission) in real life, while walking around. It sounds more akin to the current GPS-enabled mobile social networking we're seeing with loopt.com, by which friends (hopefully not strangers) can pinpoint each other's physical locations with their phones for real-life socializing. This is GPS-enhanced mobile-enabled social networking more than phone-based social networking, because it gets people together in person, but not Kwame's killer app yet because it generally gets together people who already know each other. It doesn't so much introduce people to each other *before* they get-together in a physical location. See the difference? If not, your kids probably do - I hope they're willing to explain. [See also the Boston Globe on "social networking breaking free from the PC" .]

Mobile books hot in Japan

How novel! (Sorry for the pun.) "They say kids these days don't read. In Japan, however, teens are back into reading novels big-time with one major difference: They're reading them on cell phones," reports Switched.com. Hey, if it keeps 'em reading…. Keitai ("kay-tie") are serial novels amazingly written by their mostly young authors on their cellphone keypads (shows how fast Asia's phone text-based communicators' thumbs are). They're "delivered in read-on-the-corner byte-sized chunks on a regular basis to hungry young subscribers, and the style is - predictably - manga (Japanese comic book) style. One 20-something author who was writing for 25,000 readers a day sold her novel to a book publisher, and the book sold 440,000, according to Switched.com.