8-year-old's new media-style 15 min. of fame

YouTube and an 8-year-old boy have gotten a whole lot of citizen marketing in the past few days – plus coverage in big-name sites like The Guardian, NPR, and the Washington Post. Salon.com called "Lukeywes1234" (the boy's YouTube screenname) "The littlest YouTube sensation." Though nothing like the Susan Boyle story (but this is just a kid who never appeared on US or UK national television), it's still about the tao of fame and sometimes power on the social Web, and its particulars are that a boy below the minimum age in YouTube's terms of service established an account; posted some goofy vlog (video blog) videos of himself; had a handful of subscribers that grew quickly, with the help of either 4chan (as cited in all mainstream media reports) or eBaum's World (explained here and mentioned in comments under The Guardian's story); ended up with some 15,000 subscribers before YouTube deleted his account; and is written up in major news outlets in several countries. The deletion of his account reportedly angered Europe-based online underground troll or prankster group 4chan, which in protest declared yesterday (1/6) YouTube Porn Day, threatening to embed porn into family-friendly videos on YouTube, as it did last spring (see this, but don't worry: Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams trawled YouTube "all day for examples [of 4chan's porn], and it's a lot easier to find real porn just about anywhere else").

Now there are nearly 250 tribute videos to Lukeywes1234 on YouTube, which has made little of all of this (but gotten lots of publicity). A YouTube spokesperson told Andy Carvin at NPR that this was just another day in the life of YouTube.

As Salon's Williams, concludes, "A boy puts up videos of himself, shot by his grandma, posturing as hero, and in the process actually becomes something of an unlikely hero. Why? Probably because, along with laughing at the amateurishness of the whole enterprise, people feel a real sense of fondness for a sweet kid goofing around with his computer." Hope so. If it's not about a bunch of juvenile adults and/or idealogues creating a lot of drama at the expense of a sweet kid. None of the coverage says how the kid has handled insta-fame (which is probably good, they're leaving him alone!) or whether the adults in his life are offering some love and perspective on all this. The online safety issue most on my mind these days is how we help all kids – not just famous ones – find time for reflection and independent thought amid the increasingly 24/7, reality-TV drama of schoolkid life (MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle writes compellingly about “the tethered self” here).

Anti-social networking

If for some strange reason your kids want to lose friends in Facebook, now there's help. They can download a little "Anti-Social Networking" application with features like "Insult-a-friend" or "Doodle-on-a-friend" (allowing them to "deface a friend's profile picture and send it back to them"), The Telegraph reports. They can also thoughtfully send a warning that they're considering unfriending someone using "People You May Know (But Don't Really Like)." This, of course, is marketing 2.0. The mini app was "developed on behalf of Paramount Pictures International to accompany their new film, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People." By the end of last month, some 3,000 anti-social Facebook users had downloaded the application, The Telegraph adds, but - who knows? - this could also just be a post-modern way of making or keeping friends. [I wonder if it'll soon be possible to create a non-group?]

Facebook apologizes about ads

Facebook seems to prefer to ask for users' forgiveness rather than permission. A "humbled [Facebook] CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement apologizing for the way his company rolled out the Beacon ad platform," Internet News reports. He said that now users could bow out of the program entirely, "bowing to pressure from privacy advocates and many Facebook users." More than 50,000 of them had signed a petition initiated by MoveOn.org which demanded that Facebook not broadcast information about users' purchases on other Web sites without their permission, the Financial Times reports. Internet News added that "Facebook’s retreat marks the second time it has been forced to make changes to a new technology because of privacy concerns. Last year, users protested after it introduced 'News Feed,' which allowed users to keep track of their friends’ actions on the site." Here's the New York Times's coverage.

Facebook changes ad system

Amid growing flak that its new advertising system reduces users' privacy, Facebook made some changes this week. Now users can "opt in" to having their online shopping broadcast to friends; before they had to "opt out" - a problem if they didn't know their purchasing decisions were being broadcast and they were, for example, buying holiday gifts and wanted their friends to be surprised). "The move comes a week after MoveOn.org, the non-profit public policy advocacy group, joined a growing chorus of critics of the new service," the Financial Times reports. Facebook did stop short of allowing users to opt out of the system altogether, the FT added. The system is "part of an effort to boost revenue growth by tapping into the deep social connections between Facebook users" - aimed at making social networking attractive to advertisers by tapping into the viral-marketing idea that friends are influenced by what their peers buy. Among other concerns was that of a University of Minnesota law professor. Citing his view, a New York Times blog asked the question, "Are Facebook's Social Ads Illegal [in New York]?" And consumer privacy advocates are pushing for greater control for consumers of their personal data on the Internet (see this at the Center for Democracy and Technology).

MySpace joins Google group too

One day after the big OpenSocial announcement, Google added a little afterthought: MySpace the 640-pound social-networking gorilla, Bebo another huge social-Web player, and the very longstanding SixApart were joining too. As a PCWorld blog put it, "now that changes everything." This isn't so much about Facebook users at your house - users won't be going anywhere because of this news. What it's about is those popular little add-on software programs called widgets that users love to use (for stuff like sharing tunes, putting a "bookshelf" of favorite books in your profile, or throwing virtual sheep at your friends). All those widget makers were making apps for Facebook, and now Google, MySpace and friends have serious numbers of users (aka a huge alternative market) for widgetmakers to offer their wares to. I wonder if Facebook will eventually (emphasize "eventually") have to join OpenSocial. This was a huge business story, as it has a lot to do with how sites on the social Web (as well as widget makers) will actually make money (through advertising) going forward. Here's the view from the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times in the UK, and Welt Online in Germany.

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.]

Hanging out with Sprite?

I’m not sure how well social-networking services created by advertisers purely for marketing purposes go over with teenagers (Wal-Mart tried one and quickly abandoned the project, and Anheuser-Busch’s BudTV failed). But Coca-Cola has created one called Sprite Yard, the New York Times reports. It’s a social site for cellphones. “Consumers will be able to set up personal profiles, share photos and chat online with friends, all using cellphones rather than computer screens. People will type in codes from Sprite bottle caps to redeem original content, like ring tones and short video clips called mobisodes.” Of course, Sprite Yard launched in Asia (China), because that’s where *everybody* has a mobile phone, but it has global ambitions. But watch out, Coke, MySpace is mobile, and Facebook plans to launch a mobile version, so….

Rein in food marketers?

Fast-food companies trying to be “friends” on social-networking sites; placing funny, grainy, homemade-looking clips on video sites for people to share around; developing advergames for kids’ sites – these are what a new 98-page report on food marketing in digital media is about. The report, by the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy, will be presented to “the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday [today], the eve of an FTC deadline for public comment on food marketers' tactics to reach children across all media,” CNET reports. It adds that the Center “instigated the enactment of the federal Child Online Protection Act [COPA] with its digital marketing study in the mid-'90s.” Meanwhile, CBS News took a thorough look at the very immersive advertising in sites like Neopets, Whyville (where Toyota’s promoting virtual cars in this online world for tweens) – see “Advergaming: Online Games Chock-Full Of Products — From Skittles To SpongeBob.”