Euro social networking: Full speed ahead

The social Web has solid support from the European Commission. In fact, the EC's now looking ahead to Web 3.0, which means "seamless, anytime, anywhere business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks" and "the end of the divide between mobile and fixed [phone] lines," said Viviane Reding, EC Commissioner for Information Society & Media, in a September 26 speech in Luxembourg, according to VNUNET. Europe "must lead the next generation of the Internet," she said. The EC is encouraging SN industry self-regulation and has created a task force to that end, PublicTechnology.net reports. Participants include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, Amsterdam-based Hyves, Berlin-based StudiVZ, and Paris-based Skyrock; "a number of researchers and child welfare organisations. The EC reportedly plans to unveil best-practice guidelines for social-network sites on Safer Internet Day next February 10. For context, 7thSpace.com reports, social networking has grown 35% in Europe in the past year. It added that 56% of Europe's online population visited social-network sites last year, and the number of regular users is projected to increase from 41.7 million now to 107.4 million in the next four years.

Facebook plugs security hole

The security issue was people being able to view some members' private photos using the mobile version of Facebook and the Firefox browser, CNET reports. "Basically, someone who knew the serial number of a Facebook user, which is easy to get, and knew a trick for rejiggering the URL, could see private photos of that user," according to CNET. Facebook says it fixed the flaw within hours of being notified. It also plans soon to launch a program to verify the security of third-party applications (those mini applications users download to add games, slideshows, playlists, and other features to their profiles) - an update, apparently, over the statement from a Canadian consumer privacy group in the Toronto Globe & Mail that Facebook wasn't "doing enough to screen third-party developers to ensure they're not phishing for information or trying to commit identity."

Facebook the movie

I wonder if Facebook folk are a little nervous. TV writer Aaron Sorkin has set up his Facebook profile, introducing himself this way: “I've just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I've started this page," says writer Aaron Sorkin on his Facebook page. "(Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more internet savvy than I do and she's been dead for 33 years.)” But this technophobe's a quick study, right? A Facebook spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that Facebook hadn't agreed to cooperate with any filmmaker so far, but it's flattered by the attention. Here, too, is coverage at the Times of London and Wired.

Facebook controlling 'wall spam'

Yup, yet another new term for malware on the social Web. "Wall spam" is comments on your Facebook wall purporting to be from a friend but which usually contain a link to some bad Web page that puts malicious code on your PC. The term "rose to notoriety earlier this month, when members started noticing the phenomenon, and security firms started flagging worms that were spreading via Facebook members' walls," CNET reports. Facebook appears to be on top of it (see this from the Washington Post). But tell your kids that, if they have a friend they haven't heard from in a long time and/or who just became a very bad speller, don't click! Better first to contact that friend by IM, phone, email, etc., and ask if s/he posted that comment.

Social networking's very global growth

While social networking may've reached the saturation point in North America, at just 9% growth among people 15+ over the past year, worldwide it has grown 25%, according to June traffic figures from comScore. Social networking's growth was highest in Africa and the Middle East at 66% from June 2007 to June 2008; Europe was next at 35%, and Latin America a close third at 33% (Facebook grew 1,055% in Latin America, 6/07-6/08). ComScore put the global social-networking total at 580.5 million visitors, compared to the world's total number of Internet users, 860.5 million (11% growth over June '07). The numbers for individual social-network sites were interesting too: The world's top 7 sites, in terms of June 2008 unique visitors, are Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo, and Skyrock Network, respectively. Facebook grew 153% globally to 132.1 million visitors; MySpace grew just 3% (to 117.6 million), and 3rd-ranked Hi5 had the second-highest growth rate of 100% to 56.4 million visitors. The six largest social sites, including Google's Orkut, are all US-based, though Orkut is much more popular outside the US (it's huge in Brazil) and Friendster in Southeast Asia. No. 7, the music-and-blogging community Skyrock Network, is No. 1 in France and based in France (it had 21 million visitors in June). Here's the Machinist (Salon.com columnist) on one possible explanation for social sites' popularity: persuasive technology.

Jailtime because of Facebook photos?

It's an eye-opening story teen social networkers should know about. "Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old [Rhode Island] college junior attended a Halloween party dressed ... in an orange jumpsuit labeled 'Jail Bird'," according to a report in CNN.com. Another victim of the crash gave copies of the photos to the prosecutor in Lipton's case. The prosecutor presented the photos of the "unrepentant partier" in a PowerPoint presentation at Lipton's sentencing, and the judge - who later acknowledged he was influenced by the photos - gave Lipton two years, calling him "depraved."

New project or era for social Web?

The Telegraph calls it a kind of "passport" for Web socializers. Facebook calls it "Facebook Connect." With it, other sites (e.g., Twitter, SixApart, and 22 others so far, The Telegraph says) can use people's Facebook screenname and password instead of storing separate ID info for those users. They can also offer users "the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook," the New York Times reports. Facebook Connect, which won't completely launch until the fall, isn't the only such "passport" system in the works, though. The Telegraph says its competitors are MySpace's Data Availability project and Google's OpenSocial project (Bebo's thrown in with the latter project). Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg was speaking about this, some other new features, and his view of a more decentralized social Web in future at a social-networking developers conference in San Francisco this week. He spoke, the Times reports, of social networking being "at the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.” Interestingly, Zuckerberg mentioned that more than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside the US, according to The Telegraph. See also "Facebook to clean up its apps," by my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid.

MySpace, Facebook: Basic differences

MySpace is a lot about self-expression and Facebook more about exchanging personal news and information among friends, according to a thoughtful analysis in VentureBeat.com, though somewhat biased toward Facebook. The distinction goes back to the two sites' origins. Back in 2005, MySpace was likened to a mashup of an alternate-reality game, online nightclub, music community, and teenager's bedroom that could be redecorated whenever the spirit moved (see "MySpace the new MTV"). VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon says that, unlike Facebook, MySpace is "a place for people to live out their fantasy lives online," which he acknowledges is quite a generalization but works where it concerns teens using the site to explore identity, as well as online media-producing and graphic design (see "Teens rule the Web" and "Social media gender gap"). Facebook's origins are well known and quite different: It was a college social utility defined by students' need to know more about a roommate, potential date, etc., where people were quickly busted if they fictionalized info about themselves. "If they provided fake information, their friends from across the hall would simply leave comments saying so on their profile pages," Eldon writes. Both can certainly be useful in many countries - one can see the value of a social utility in other countries, within local circles of friends and to keep in touch with friends who've emigrated or to stay in touch with people they've met from other countries. Eldon's analysis describes this well (and my own experience overseas in recent months bore this out). Here, for example, is the view of social networking from Kenya.

Facebook, MySpace neck and neck globally

MySpace is still No. 1 in the US, but Facebook caught up to MySpace's monthly traffic worldwide in April with 115 million visitors, PCWorld reports, citing research by comScore (the International Herald Tribune reports that MySpace has reached 118 million registered users). "Myspace has maintained similar traffic numbers for the past year, but Facebook has grown from less than 40,000 unique monthly visitors in April 2007" to the 115 million" a year later. In the US, MySpace's unique visitor figure for April was 72 million, compared to Facebook's 36 million. Here's TechCrunch's coverage too. Meanwhile, the social-networking concept is quite the juggernaut: The European Parliament is developing its own social-networking site, The Telegraph reports, and the UK's House of Lords is on YouTube.com, the Associated Press reports.

US's top 5 social network sites

The US's top 5 social network sites in terms of visitors in April (the latest figures available) are MySpace, Facebook, myYearbook, Bebo, and BlackPlanet, in that order, according to Web traffic research firm Hitwise. Interestingly, this was also the ranking order for the sites in terms of returning visitors and time spent on the sites. MySpace's April market share was 73.82%, Hitwise said, followed by Facebook (14.8%), myYearbook (1.33%), Bebo (1.09%), and BlackPlanet (0.98%).

MyYearbook: US's fastest-growing social site

It seems to fly mostly under the radar where adults and conventional news media are concerned but, according to Web traffic measurer Hitwise, myYearbook.com is now the third-ranking social network site in the US. That's according to Hitwise's figures for share of visitors this past April. My guess is, the site's smart to stay focused on high school-aged users. Founded in 2005 by siblings Dave and Catherine Cook when they were high school students, myYearbook is also the fastest growing social site, PhillyBurbs.com cites HitWise figures as showing, with market share growth of "426% in the past year alone. Visitors to myYearbook.com spent more time on the site than they did on the two leading social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook. The average visit was 32 minutes and 54 seconds for myYearbook, compared to 29:54 for MySpace and almost 21 minutes for Facebook." Favorite features among its users, according to myYearbook, are "'Match,' which enables them to make new connections online; 'Battles,' where members battle for 'Best Looking' or 'Cutest Couple'; 'Pimp,' an all-out profile customization tool with all the glitters and animations anyone could ever want; and 'myMag,' where young people sound off on issues like anorexia, cliques, relationships, and the fashions and foibles of their favorite celebrities." The site added "Video Battles" and "myMag" last July.

How teens use social network sites: Clear insights

For some of the clearest, most significant insights yet into how young people use digital media, consider watching footage from "From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth," a forum recently held at Stanford University. Hundreds of hours of observation and interviews with young people around the US by more than 20 researchers are represented in the presentations. They're on the second video in the group, introduced by Mimi Ito, one of the principal investigators of the Digital Youth project. Their work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Try to watch all the way through to Ito's meaty summary at the end of the second video.

Of particular interest to parents concerned about teen social networkers' safety are findings by C.J. Pascoe mentioned by Dr. Ito, for example that: "Contrary to common fears, flirting and dating are almost always initiated offline in the traditional settings where teens get together and extended online. Her work clearly shows there's a strong social norm among teens that the online space isn't a place to find new romantic partners, but a place to deepen and explore existing offline relationships." Exceptions: marginalized teens "whose romantic partners are restricted for cultural or religious reasons" and gay and lesbian teens (the latter are "not reaching out online for random social encounters but using the expanded possibilities online selectively to overcome limitations they're facing" in their offline social networks); and the very small percentage of teens most at risk of sexual exploitation (see "Profile of a teen online victim"). You'll probably appreciate too, as I did: Heather Horst's findings on teen use of social sites and digital meeting within the context of the family; Ito's comments on the two forms of teen social networking, friendship-driven and interest-driven; danah boyd's insights into the friendship-driven side and Dilan Mahendran's fascinating examples of interest-driven, collaborative digital media making. They all indicate that there is a growing intelligence among teen social media producers about audience: "What they make is inextricably linked to who they make it for and with. They're making media for niche networked publics, not the undifferentiated public of mass media."

Latin America's social Web

Hi5.com is No. 1 in Latin America's social-networking scene, according to fresh figures from comScore, and social Web use as a whole is growing fast there. The number of unique visitors for the region has grown "from 53.6 million unique visitors last June, to 61.6 million this past April" (the latest figure available), VentureBeat.com cites comScore research as showing. Hi5 had 12.8 million visitors in April, "about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world." Facebook (whose worldwide user figure for April was 116.4 million compared to MySpace's 115.7 million) was the fastest-growing SNS in the region and had 7.7 million Latin American visitors in April. One possible explanation for Hi5's popularity might be its linguistic tailoring for individual markets - e.g., "two new Spanish versions, for the Argentinian and Castilian dialects, with more dialect translations to come." It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against [Google's] Orkut." Other growth sites to watch are Sonico, Batanga, and Vostu (for people to create their own social sites), VentureBeat reports. Having said all that, VentureBeat adds that blogging is still more popular than social networking in Latin America, with blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger, and local platforms "larger than Hi5 or any of its competitors," and mobile social networking is exploding (66% of Latin Americans own mobile phones, compared to the worldwide average of 46%).

Age verification not the 'killer app'

ConnectSafely.org, a site and forum, Larry Magid and I co-direct, was invited to join the Internet Safety Task Force that is part of MySpace's settlement last January with 49 state attorneys general. The Task Force's first meeting last month - attended by Internet companies including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, AOL, Google, and Yahoo, age- and identity-verification companies, and online-safety organizations - caused Larry to feel "a bit of a disconnect," he wrote in a commentary at CBSNEWS.com. Why? Because one of the Task Force's main goals is to see if age verification technology can be used to protect minors from bad stuff in social sites and," yet, at its first full meeting ... the experts who addressed the task force painted a picture that causes me to wonder if such technology would be helpful even if it could be employed." Pls check out his piece to see why. See also "Verifying kids' ages: Key question for parents" and "Social networker age verification revisited."

'Curmudgeon's' guide to widgets

Not everyone loves widgets, those little applications supposedly adding fun and a sort of animation to social-networking profiles. Parents, here's the perspective of someone who finds some of them a little annoying (words such as "insidious" and "invasive" are used), including Facebook's No. 1 app, the FunWall. Another, bigger, reason to be wary of widgets is in the privacy-protection area. Note this from the Associated Press: "People often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, if they're set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city. But that's not true if they use applications [aka "widgets"]. On Facebook, for instance, applications can only be downloaded if a user checks a box allowing its developers to 'know who I am and access my information,' which means everything on a profile, except contact info. Given little thought, agreeing to the terms has become a matter of routine for the nearly 70 million Facebook users worldwide who use applications to spruce up their pages and to flirt, play and bond with friends online."

Facebook & user privacy

Ya gotta hand it to Facebook for responsiveness to public concerns (and news media reports on said). No way to be sure we have a perfect cause-and-effect situation here, but one week in January we hear from CNET that it's really hard to delete a profile from Facebook and the UK government is concerned, sharing that concern with the BBC and The Telegraph. Then the New York Times chimes in on the subject a couple of weeks later, following that report two days later with "Quitting Facebook Gets Easier." "The updated Facebook help page now includes the question “How do I delete my account?” With this last piece, the Times has made a man named Nipon Das - who tried to delete his Facebook account for two months and likened the experience to "Hotel California," our of where, the Eagles song goes, you can check out any time but can never leave - "a mascot for disgruntled Facebook users," the Times says.

MySpace, Facebook support NY law

The headline was that New York introduced a new anti-predator law. The news was that Facebook participated with MySpace and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in the announcement. The law would, as a condition of parole, prohibit convicted sex offenders from accessing social networking Web sites, from accessing pornographic content online, and from communicating with anyone under the age of 18 over the Net, Dow Jones reports. Offenders would also be required to disclose their email, IM, and chat screennames and other Internet contact info with law enforcement and social sites so the sites can block them. Both MySpace and Facebook have worked with attorneys general for some time, but this is the first time they've appeared together at a major announcement by an attorney general and may preface Facebook's participation in the technical task force announced by 49 state attorneys general and MySpace on January 14. Laws similar to the legislation New York announced today have been passed in 11 states including Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Virginia.

Politician's profile deleted

It was Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, a British member of Parliament, whose Facebook page was deleted after someone sent in an abuse report calling it an imposter profile. Soon there was a Facebook group called "Steve Webb is Real!", CNET reports. His profile was shortly reinstated, to the satisfaction of his 2,500 Facebook friends and constitutents. But what's interesting about all this is that on the social Web it's sometimes as hard to prove there's a real person behind a profile as it is to prove there isn't. [See also "Extreme cyberbullying: US case comes to light."]

New features afoot at MySpace

MySpace plans to be people's dashboard for navigating cyberspace, USATODAY reports - the place "where they can check in on the activities of friends, peruse email, get the latest on news and weather, and post their favorite photos and videos." To deal with the growing threat Facebook represents to MySpace, USATODAY says, the latter is projecting itself as a place for self-expression rather than being the social "utility" it says Facebook is (Facebook declined comment for the story). There are 6 million bands registered on MySpace, USATODAY adds. Other plans for 2008 include: giving members "the option of creating multiple profiles tailored to friends, family and business associates. A channel with Oberon Media, a maker of multiplayer games, is in the works for the first half of 2008. MySpace unveiled a service that lets MySpace members make free Internet phone calls through Skype (EBAY). And it just unfurled Transmissions, a program that lets musicians showcase music on their pages and sell performance videos," according to the article. With more members than the population of Mexico and local versions in 22 countries and territories outside the US, MySpace also continues its international expansion, planning to open offices and "launch custom sites in India, Russia, Poland, South Korea, and Turkey, the Zooped blog reports. For example, in India, where Net speeds are comparatively slow, a less bandwidth-greedy version is in the works. In South Korea, where blogging is hugely popular, MySpace will be more of a blogging site than in the US (though blogging is part of the US MySpace experience). Meanwhile, Facebook is growing fast internationally too - see Zooped for some comScore figures it cites.

Oz union's Facebook profile

The Australian Workers Union is marketing itself to youth by establishing a presence in Facebook, Australian IT reports. Though union leaders say its profile will get more sophisticated, for now "users can add the ‘Proud AWU Supporter’ application to their profile pages to obtain the organisation's latest news feeds." Version 2.0 will let users "interact directly" with the union, which says it wants to differentiate itself from most unions, which "generally ignore new forms of communication."

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.

Applying for college at Facebook

Yup, it's now possible. I would love to hear from you if high schoolers at your house or school are using Facebook not only to research schools but also to apply. The widget's called College Planner, and its source, Embark.com, says students can research some 5,000 schools and apply to more than 1,000. As a CNET blogger points out, it's hard to imagine that people wouldn't wonder if colleges and universities would take such applications seriously, much less want to share all their academic plans with social-networking peers. As of this writing, only one person has added the widget to his profile (as seen on the College Planner widget page in Facebook). According to a thorough writeup on this in the Yale Daily News, Yale University has "no immediate plans" to join this program. Anyway, if you have any first-hand knowledge of this Facebook feature, email anne(at)netfamilynews.org. Here's the L.A. Times's latest report on Facebook in general.

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.

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.

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.

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").

Facebook courted, criticized

It was a big news week for Facebook this week. First, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Microsoft was discussing buying a small chunk of Facebook. It would be a minority stake of about 5%, valued at $300 million to $500 million. "But Microsoft must first outgun Google, which has also expressed strong interest in a Facebook stake," the Journal adds. On the downside for Facebook, New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo said his office "issued subpoenas to gather more information about the Palo Alto company's policies and procedures after an undercover investigation found that Facebook was slow to respond to complaints about sexual solicitations of underage users," the Los Angeles Times reports. Facebook said in a statement that Facebook took the attorney general's concerns "very seriously" and would work with him and other attorneys general, the Times added.

Parents of college-bound in Facebook

Parents of the college-bound are beginning to use Facebook too - to find out what their kids' roommates will be like - and schools aren't sure this is a good thing! "A growing number of schools say they're getting more requests for changes — from parents who don't like the roommates' Facebook profiles," USATODAY reports. The article says housing officials cite party photos as referenced most by complaining parents, but one Syracuse University "says race, religion and sexual orientation are the top three concerns from parents contacting officials there," and an administrator at Suffolk University in Boston said sexual orientation was the No. 1 parental concern she heard about. Most schools USATODAY contacted said they don't make changes because of these calls, and the University of Chicago said it never allows changes until the third week (at Syracuse the wait is between 8 weeks and the whole fall semester). Meanwhile, you know social networking's mainstream not only when parents are checking up on potential roommates but when Wal-Mart's advertising back-to-school products in Facebook (see Reuters on this.)

Facebook & ID theft

This is something for social networkers to be on the alert about: computer security and social engineering on social-networking sites (social engineering is what phishers and identity thieves use to trick people into making themselves and their devices vulnerable to hacks and ID theft). The latest warning signal concerns Facebook, which recently announced it's becoming a social-networking platform for all kinds of online services and widgets. "While thousands of applications being developed by third parties for Facebook users are enriching the social network's functionality, the Facebook Platform provides a perfect channel for distributing malicious software," CNET reports. To be fair, experts quoted in the article are talking more about the potential than actual attacks. And, "while Facebook third-party developers do not necessarily have access to Facebook members' personal details, whether users agree to install an application is ultimately a caveat emptor scenario" - meaning read the fine print before you agree to install stuff, people!

AG's spotlight moves to Facebook

An anonymous person who said he or she was "a concerned parent" contacted the New York Times about a fake teen profile he (we'll make it "he" to simplify) created apparently to check into the predator risk on Facebook, the Times reports. The "parent" had this imaginary teen join sex-related groups (ongoing discussions users can join) and add some of the members to "her" friends list. Since that made her screenname and photo visible to other members, the imaginary teen started getting sexual solicitations. Facebook's terms of use prohibit such activity, but it relies on a combination of staff monitoring and user abuse reports to take action, and, the Times article indicates, not everything can be caught, at least not right away. What's hardest to stop is when people, including imaginary ones, are looking for trouble, Facebook indicated in the Times article (for info on exactly this type of user and vulnerability, please see "Profile of a teen online victim"). Other pieces of this story include Facebook's own project for reporting registered sex offenders on its site, and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's announcement that "investigators in his state were looking into three or more' cases of convicted sex offenders who had registered on Facebook." The Times adds that "Mr. Blumenthal said he was taking a particular interest in Facebook because his children use the service."

Facebook's growth spurt

Christopher Beam of Slate calls Facebook “the Volvo of social networking,” the kind of “comfy, sturdy, and attractive without being showy” social site “you’d bring home to Mom.” But that’s all changing, at least the Volvo part, since Facebook “tore down its walls and opened its pages” to outside widget providers allowing Facebookers to add to their pages little features like a Graffiti widget that allows visitors to doodle on your page, an “Honest Box” that lets your visitors say what they really think of you (anonymously – watch out, concerned-citizens-against-cyberbullying), or the very popular iLike that lets people share their favorite tunes (“growing at the rate of 200,000 people/day,” as of Beam’s posting, and Graffiti having been downloaded 3.3 million times). He cites the Wall Street Journal as saying Facebook itself added 3 million+ users in the few weeks since its big opening (see “Facebook’s big plans”). In its just-released figures, ComScore says Facebook’s “most dramatic growth occurred among 25-34 year olds (up 181%), while 12-17 year olds grew 149%” and users 35+ 98%. The smallest growth, understandably was among college-age users (38%), which demographic may already be saturated where Facebook’s concerned.

Parenting with profiles?

I co-wrote a book for parents that includes instructions on how to create a MySpace profile. I’ve often suggested to parents that they create their own profiles so they can monitor their kids’ social-networking activities. But I have no illusions that this is the solution for every household with teenagers. Fellow mom Michelle Slatalla’s fun-to-read account in the New York Times of where creating her own Facebook profile got her definitely confirms that I should have no illusions that this is every parent’s online-safety solution. But it also confirms my growing conviction that – just as their social-networking experiences are just an extension of teens’ offline social lives – so does a parent and child’s online relating mirror their experience in real life. (Don’t miss Michelle’s account of her exchange with the Facebook spokesperson on p. 2 of her article.)

Top-ranked social sites

It’s no surprise that MySpace and Facebook were the first- and second-ranked social-networking sites on Compete.com’s list for March ’07 – in terms of both site visitors and “attention” (Compete’s word for percentage of their online time people spend on a particular site). What was interesting was that Bebo was No. 9 in terms of visitors and No. 3 in terms of the amount of attention it gets from its users. “Bebo, a relatively new player in the space, has more than tripled in both unique visitors and attention from March 2006 to March 2007,” the Compete blog reports. By attracting and engaging quality traffic, the site leaps from 9th ranked in Unique Visitors to third in Attention.” Tagged, targeting mostly teens and with more than 30 million members, is No. 5 in both categories. Interestingly, BlackPlanet, targeting African Americans and with 16 million+ members, is No. 4 in Attention and not quite in the Top 10 in terms of unique visitors. Google’s Orkut, which is huge in Brazil and ranks 8th in Attention, is only 22nd in terms of site visitors.