Cellphones = wireless connected computers

Landlines may be going away (see CNET), but don't think of cellphones merely as their replacement for voice communications - at least not if you're a parent. Because to get a better handle on how young people use phones, think of them as "the world's most ubiquitous computers," as the New York Times put it recently, adding that there are 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide right now. The social network sites certainly get it. MySpace "has seen its mobile user base grow by 400% from last year, and now nearly 20 million users access the site through [mobile] phones," InformationWeek reports, and Facebook "is also looking to expand its mobile presence and is reportedly in talks with Nokia and Motorola for tighter integration into handsets." (BTW, on the landline subject, CNET reported that 17.5% of US households depended solely on cellphones for their phone communications during the first half of 2008, up from 13.6% a year earlier.)

Parental social networkers multiplying

Well, an actual group labeled "parents" wasn't measured, but I suspect parents figured prominently in a Nielsen study that found 35-to-49-year-olds are the fastest-growing group in social-network sites. "Time spent on these sites is growing three times faster than the overall Internet rate ... [and] more than two-thirds of the world's online population now visits social networking and blogging sites," USATODAY reports, citing the study. In fact, one out of every 11 minutes of the average Web user's time is spent in a social site, the USATODAY article says, and one out of every 6 minutes in the UK, reports the BBC. The Nielsen study looked at nine countries. Among these, Brazil was No. 1 in social networking and blogging with 80% of Net users visiting such sites. Spain and the US were Nos. 2 and 3, at 75% and 67%, respectively, according to USATODAY. Social networking has surpassed Web email among top computer activities across the user population, the (others are search, portals, and PC software). As for mobile social networking, the numbers of Britons accessing a social site via their phone was up 249% (the BBC doesn't say, but that's probably in the past year). If you're a parent in Facebook or MySpace, check out "Virtual helicopter parenting" and, in the Los Angeles Times, "Big Mother is watching."

Of mobile social networkers: Survey

This is a pretty digitally advanced group (active mobile social-networking users aged 16-52), and itsmy.com was surveying 15,000 of its own users, but the findings from this big early-adopting group are pretty interesting if you wonder about mobile social networkers habits: 95% of those in the US and 96% of UK ones "already use the mobile as the main means of communication with their beloved ones," and 42% never used a social site designed for computer screens," and 42% never used a social site designed for computer screens, reports itsmy parent GOFRESH, based in Munich, Germany. Other key findings: the average users is surfing 160 mobile Web pages a day, and heavy users "log in up to 10 times a day for up to 2.5 hours" to write and check messages, find out where their friends are and what they're doing "at this very moment," or upload photos and videos to their itsmy pages. More than 90% said that if they had "reasonably priced flat rates," higher network speeds, and faster phones with longer battery lives, they would increase their mobile Web use. But despite current high prices, "even the current economic situation does not stop most of them from using the mobile Web: "only 1/3 of all respondents tend to reduce their mobile online time to save money."

Cellphone to be No. 1 access tool: Study

By 2020, the mobile phone will be the main tool for connecting to the Internet for most of the world's people, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's latest "Internet Evolution" study. "The study asked a group of 'Internet leaders, activists and analysts' to forecast what they expect to be the major technology advances of the next decade," the Washington Post reports. Two other interesting predictions concerned social tolerance and virtual reality, and the experts polled seem to have felt just as uncertain as the rest of us about what impact connective technology will have on human relations and social tolerance: "The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness." Their prediction about virtual reality lines up with teens' approach to tech for some time: "divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations."

Ever more mobile social Web

Like our children now, we in the future may have so many people in our phone address books that we'll need help remembering where we met them. At least that's what Yahoo's new social app for phones seems to illustrate, as just-unveiled oneConnect expands its market from young early adopters to us. "The centerpiece is a tab called Pulse, where it integrates Facebook, Twitter and other networks on to the same page. That's where you can see the latest status updates and photos uploaded, and with one click you can get to that person's address card. On the address card, it lists how you know that person, through Facebook or MySpace, for example," the Washington Post reports. For now, it's only for the iPhone. That was just one of the social features announced at the latest CTIA trade show. Verizon Wireless unveiled SocialLife, allowing users "to view messages, approve or deny friend requests, post comments or photos, and update status or profiles on their mobile phones," the Post reported separately. SocialLife, at $1.49/month, "works with MySpace, AsianAve, BlackPlanet, FaithBase, GLEE, LiveJournal, MiGente, Photobucket, Rabble and MTV Tr3s. SocialLife costs $1.49 a month." Verizon Wireless also has a deal with Facebook called "Ringback Buddies," with which Facebook users can browse, buy and manage their ringtones from within Facebook and view their friends' favorite music (and buy it) to play when those friends call. Finally, an email company, Visto, announced its "living address book." Basically it puts all your social networks into one place on your phone. "The service includes Yahoo!, AOL, Google Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Photobucket, and sends out notifications of new pictures, posts, and other events from your favorite contacts."

Hi5 socializing for mobiles

The difference between Hi5.com's social-network site for the cellphone screen and those of MySpace and Facebook, CNET points out, is that Hi5's mobile edition 1) "openly targets" people around the world who primarily use mobile phones, not computers, to socialize, and 2) launched in 26 languages. CNET says Facebook and MySpace's mobile editions are designed more as supplements to their Web browser-accessed sites. Point No. 1 above makes particular sense for Hi5's Latin American market, if comScore's international social-networking data is to be believed. ComScore's recently unveiled data showed a 1,055% increase in traffic for Hi5 between June 2007 and this past June. Here's my summary of the comScore report. Here, too, is some context on the growing MoSoSo, or mobile-social-networking, phenomenon from the Christian Science Monitor.

GPS-enabled mobile-socializing trend

Interesting to get the Australian perspective on what looks to be a worldwide trend: "Experts say the 'killer application' for mobile social networking - the ability to access social networks such as Facebook and Bebo on mobile phones - will be the ability to use the global positioning software now found in phones to help cyber-buddies meet at-real life locations," Australian IT reports. The tech news site says, though phone-based social networking is very new in Oz, it's "growing at such a rapid rate it has become a key driver of mobile Internet use in the past six months." It cites a mobile marketing executive as saying he spends more than half his cellphone time on social-networking sites, which he thinks will become commonplace for everyone within two years. MySpace says that, worldwide, it "attracts 1.9 million mobile users a day." Meanwhile, Japan is already there. In that country, "the mobile Web is [already] bigger than the PC Web," the Washington Post reports, but home-grown companies may do better in the mobile space than US-based ones, as has been the case with Japanese social networking on the Web.

Smart phones in New York

Pretty soon it'll be like this everywhere, not just New York City, with people walking nominally forward, relying for navigation largely on other senses besides eyes: "As night settled in," says the New York Times editorial writer about watching passers by from a sidewalk restaurant, "I could see the glow of the screens shining upward on the faces of their owners.... Were they Twittering? Following their GPS? Checking their stocks? Reading their email? Texting a friend? Playing Cash Bandicoot? [huh?]...." Writer Verlyn Klinkenborg cites one unnamed source as saying that, by 2011, there will be 5 billion people using these cellphone-cum-computers on the planet. Whoa. A slightly modified scene from The Matrix comes to mind - all these meandering smart-phone users whose real lives are in a other places in addition to where they are on sidewalk. It's like teen social lives today, occurring simultaneously in a whole bunch of places: where they are physically, on the Web, on their cellphone, and maybe in World of Warcraft, Teen Second Life, or Xbox Live.

10 mobile social networks

The number alone is significant. And more mobile social networks (or services for phone-based socializing) are mentioned in the reader comments below this item in ReadWriteWeb.com. They're the services that want to be "the MySpace of the mobile Web," as Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb put it in another post. Twitter's not even on that list of 10 - is that because they're distinguishing between mobile (cellphone) blogging and mobile socializing (I think there's a fine line between the two, but maybe that's because I'm following the advice of author/professor Daniel Solove and trying to think less in terms of binaries such as online vs. offline, blogging vs. socializing, private vs. public and thinking in more granular ways)? Why is the growing number of phone-based social services significant? According to Perez, "InStat is predicting that by 2012, there will be nearly 30 million 'millennials' [Gen Y-ers or people born between the mid '80s and the mid-'90s] in the US using a mobile social network of some sort, and a ComputerWorld report confirms that, worldwide, that number will soar to 975 million by 2012." Any "millennials" in your family are quite likely to be among them.

New iPhone: A parent's view

The last time I checked, there were almost 2,000 articles worldwide in Google News about the very cool, $199 smart (3G) iPhone just unveiled by Apple's Steve Jobs. I'll bet not one of them offered a parent's-eye-view of this product. But the view is clear across these relatively uncharted waters: the pressure is on, parents; a whole lot of young cellphone users will want one. The reasons: it's cheaper, they'll argue (than the first iPhone at $399), and "you'll be able to find me anytime," a smart teen will tell you, "because it has GPS technology." What they probably won't tell you is that, with it, they - the ultimate multitaskers - can surf the Web and do mobile social networking twice as fast as on the old iPhone (the new one "runs on AT&T's high-speed network using 3G technology," the Washington Post reports), so they can watch video, get directions to parties, etc., "even when they're on a call," Apple marketing says. Also attractive to teens, who really like to download and mess around with software applications and games on phones, in social sites, and on the Web in general, my ConnectSafely co-director and CBS News tech analyst Larry Magid reminds me, will be the iPhone's App Store (some of the apps will be free, Apple says). Here's Larry's piece on the new iPhone at CBSNEWS.com. Avid music and video sharers may prefer the 16 gig $299 version, but they might keep that wish to themselves in case it lessens their chances of getting an iPhone at all, right?

Then there's the safety question: What parents also need to know, though, is that this and other 3G phones are basically mini Net-connected computers that go everywhere with their users. With one significant difference: this little mobile computer's movements can be tracked. With GPS technology, you can pinpoint your kids' locations, as they'll tell you, but so can their friends (with social-mapping services such as loopt) and - potentially - non-friends, if they're using a social-mapping service and aren't careful about giving their numbers out to and keeping friends lists restricted only to their real-life friends. We are clearly way beyond putting filtering and other parental controls on a single family computer plugged into a wall in a high-traffic area of the house.

The iPhone does come with parental controls, the Seattle Times reports, but I couldn't find any specifics on them yet at Apple.com. The phone has to be used with a two-year AT&T service contract, and AT&T and the other major US carriers also have parental controls, but parents will need to check with AT&T to see if its service's controls work with the iPhone's. To see what controls are available from the major cellphone companies, click to "What Mobile carriers need to do for kids" (see also our forum ConnectSafely's "Cell-Phone Safety Tips"). [See also the New York Times on how 3G or smartphones are taking off and how 71% of women make the decision about their family’s wireless choices, including phones and service plans. (Smartphones require data plans that can cost $30 or more a month.)]

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%).

Twitter not upholding Terms of Use: Why important?

Last week I wrote that two cases put the spotlight on sites' Terms of Service, and - whatever legal scholars say (I'll get to that in a minute) - this is a good thing. It's good because it sheds light on one part of the social Web that needs public awareness.

Now a timely illustration. Long-time Twitter fan and blogger Ariel Waldman has shined her own spotlight on how Twitter, another social Web service, isn't enforcing its Terms of Service and to what effect. [For more on the service, see "Do you Twitter?"]

"Overall, Twitter is a great platform to connect with friends and co-workers," Ariel writes. But, she adds, "considering the social-network sphere as it exists today, most people would assume that Twitter would be prepared to react and take action against TOS [Terms of Service] violations...."

The reason why she brings up the site's TOS is because a fellow Twitter user harassed her for months starting in June 2007. The harassment escalated, she says, with the user putting her full name in abusive posts in a public forum. "I would periodically report cases of continuing harassment (some of which spread between Flickr and Twitter). Twitter would take no action while Flickr would immediately ban and remove all traces of the harassment."

This past March, as it continued, she says she wrote to Twitter, including Web pages with examples of the abuse, and asking that the user be removed. Citing Twitter's 4th Term of Service - "You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users” - she told them, "Honestly, I believe this harassment has gotten way out of hand for too long. I am writing to you ... to remove this user for consistent long-term harassment."

Twitter's response after three days, she says, was: “Unfortunately, although [this user’s] behavior is admittedly mean, [s/he] isn’t necessarily doing anything against our terms of service.... We can’t remove [this user’s] profile or ban [this user’s] IP address; [they’re] not doing anything illegal.” For some reason this respondent was confusing what's illegal with what violates the site's TOS or community rules.

Ariel writes that she copied Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on her reply, which said:

“I don’t believe this is a case of illegal activity - this is a clear case of harassment which is outlined in your TOS...."

Dorsey asked for a phone conversation with her (see her blog post for her notes on the call, March 19), at the end of which he asked what action on Twitter's part would make her happy. She answered as before, she writes: that the harasser be banned or at least warned.

"Jack didn’t get back to me until I emailed him on April 9 with eight new instances of abuse that included my full name and email address...." The CEO then did respond, Ariel writes, with this email:

“Ariel, apologies for the delay here. We’ve reviewed the matter and decided it’s not in our best interest to get involved. We’ve tasked our lawyers with a full review and update of our TOS. Thank you for your patience and understanding and good luck with resolving the problem. Best, Jack.” [See the bottom of Ariel's post for nearly 300 comments from readers.]

When she wrote about all this in Twitter's out-sourced customer support forum at GetSatisfaction.com, she did get two more responses from the company, one of which said in part: "Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content." In response to that, Ariel later writes, "A decent portion of Twitter users see the service as a community (similar to Flickr), while Twitter chooses to view themselves as a “communication utility” (similar to AT&T)."

An interesting distinction. Courts actually have put social-networking sites in the same category as phone companies in their interpretations of the Communications Decency Act. And it is true that only the people involved can fully resolve an argument between them, regardless of whether it happens on the phone or in a social-networking site (for one reason, because no matter how many times a site's customer-service department might bar a harasser or take down defaming profiles, more comments or profiles can pop up under a new screenname).

However, let's look at this a little more closely:

1. Even phone companies get involved if customers report being stalked or threatened.

2. Ariel was not asking Twitter to change the harasser's behavior or resolve his apparent problem with her; she was asking that Twitter warn or ban him for violating the site's TOS with public harassment that included her full name and email address.

3. Interestingly, society as a whole - not just users, but parents and attorneys general too - has increasingly viewed and treated social sites as communities that need to be accountable and abide by and enforce their rules of operation as a baseline best practice - even though the US's social-networking industry hasn't yet started a discussion of social site best practices (for the UK's discussion see my posts on the Byron Review and the British Home Office's guidance for social-networking best practices).

Do you think Ariel's view reflects what we have come to expect of social sites, at least where minors are concerned? [I'd welcome your thoughts via anne@netfamilynews.org or posted in the ConnectSafely forum.] I wonder what the reaction would've been if Ariel and her harasser were teens and the site under discussion were MySpace.

Now for the part about what legal scholars are saying

About the Drew indictment, that is. University of Pennsylvania law professor Andrea Matwyshyn told a Wired blogger of her concern that, "if successfully prosecuted, the case [against 49-year-old Lori Drew about her involvement in the Megan Meier case] could set a bad precedent for turning breach-of-contract civil cases into criminal ones."

That does indeed have scary implications and needs consideration. But that doesn't change my view, blogged last week, that in Drew's indictment, "existing law is being unprecedentedly applied in a way that puts the public focus on sites' terms of service as, basically, a set of user safety regs that need to be observed by all as a protection to all." I feel strongly that two things will get us all closer to a safer social Web: 1) greater understanding, scrutiny, and enforcement of site terms of service and 2) better education for all participants about accountable behavior online. So, it's not good to set bad precedents, but it is good to try applying law in a way that strengthens the role of Terms of Use in the online-safety mix.

Related links

The UK Home Office's "Good practice guidance for the providers of social
networking and other user interactive services 2008"

My blog post on the Home Office's best-practices guidance

It's half-a-year old, but here's an interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

"Popular blogger ignites uproar over Twitter harassment" in Webware.com

Thanks to tech educator Anne Bubnic of the California Technology Assistance Project for pointing out Ariel Waldman's post.

Trend afoot: Cloud socializing

We all know that kids socialize and share media on computers, phones, Xbox Live, etc. They don't think much about the delivery device. Pretty soon neither will we. The New York Times reports on "pocketable" and "cloud" computing, pointing among other things to Adobe's new AIR software that will help "merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones.... But," it adds, "most people may never know AIR is there. Applications [sub in "socializing"] will look and run the same whether the user is at his desk or his portable computer, and soon when using a mobile device or at an Internet kiosk." I'm subbing in "socializing" because that's how mobile everything teens do online will be. They already make nearly no distinction between devices or online and offline. We're all just going the way of the online teen. The mobile Internet has only begun. Now think about filtering or monitoring software in this context. It can be useful, but how much control does it reliably give parents when online socializing is wherever the Internet is, wherever kids are? I'm not trying to discourage, just offer a reality check. Increasingly, the only safeguard as mobile as online teens, is the software between their ears. But loving, engaged parenting can be very flexible and spontaneous too and (most important for teens - though they'd be reluctant to admit it), parenting is there running in the background when it's most needed.

Phone-based 'icebreaker'

A new "real-space social networking" product for iPhones, iPod Touch devices, and laptops called iFob is a sign of the way social networking is going. It's marketed as being "simple, fun, and gamelike," and it probably is in the right hands. "Instead of logging onto a social networking site and searching through lists of far away strangers who may be living in virtual fantasy lands, iFob finds other people who are in the exact same location, at the exact same time, as each other," WirelessDesignAsia.com reports. Users can chat with each other in that location or just send one-liners like "here to meet someone." "Unlike social networking sites such as Facebook or My Space, iFob only displays lists of iFob users who are actually in the same hotspots at the same time, meaning that iFob users who seem interesting will be close enough to look up and exchange smiles." iFob is designed to become an icebreaker to real conversations. There are some similarities between this and California-based loopt's mobile social networking, but this report didn't go into whether iFob has a similar level of safety measures to loopt's.

Socializing online, on phones in Japan

It's huge in Japan, where Mixi.jp is the No. 1 social-networking site and the No. 2 site in general (after Yahoo), Forbes reports. But even Mixi's computer-based social networking is facing growing competition not so much from other Web social sites as from mobile-based social networking. "This year, for the first time, the number of mobile users accessing Mixi's browser-based mobile system outweighed the number of visitors who have PCs." And the phone socializers are younger than the computer-based ones, Forbes adds: "58% are under 25, compared with 43% of Mixi's PC users." Mixi's mobile competition is "Mobage-town," (Japanese shorthand for "mobile gaming town"), which doesn't even have a presence on the Web. Mobage-town users "send their avatars through a series of games, linking up with friends and competing for bragging rights. The free service has its own currency and pages where users can buy various gewgaws for their avatars." Forbes says the service claims "50% penetration among Japanese teens" and 8 million users.

Mobile Web: We're on the cusp

There has been a whole lot of media hype about the mobile Web. So much so that smart reporters are now writing reality checks (see the New York Times). But with the iPhone's arrival, Google's plans for the FCC's looming 700 Mhz spectrum auction, and an announcement this week from Verizon Wireless, we really do seem to be at an important crossroads. eWeek reports that "the mobile industry is shifting into Internet gear." Business Week reports that Verizon Wireless's move "to let customers use a broader range of cell phones and wireless features on its network was greeted by many observers as a stunning about-face." And the Baltimore Sun offers the big picture on what this means for all of us, including our kids - upsides and downsides, of course. For one thing, I think it means phones really will be access points to the Internet. Which means that parents and educators either will need to need to apply rules and "parental controls" to more devices and access points or will need increasingly to help young people develop their internal filters - critical thinking and content and behavior online.

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.

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).

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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."]

Cellphone socializing takes off

Mobile social networking is taking off. "Mobile user-generated content will generate revenues of over $5.7 billion in 2012, compared to $572 million this year. And of that 2012 total, 50% will be accounted for by social networking services," TechDigest.tv reports, citing Juniper Research numbers. And mobile research firm M:Metrics just released a "snapshot" of worldwide mobile social-networking: "Of note it is the US audience, which is traditionally hesitant to use the Web browser on their mobile handsets, that is the largest with 7.5 million or 3.5% of mobile subscribers accessing a social networking site with their mobile device during the month of June 2007," MobileMessaging2.com reports. Italy, the UK, Spain, Germany and France follow the US in that order." Also interesting was that US mobile social networkers are more of college age (18-24), while those in other countries were in the 13-18 age group. The most popular sites accessed by phone: MySpace and Facebook in that order, followed by YouTube in the US and Meebo in the UK. Here's CNET on the M:Metrics findings. Let's hope that, while they're social networking by phone, people are doing so safely. Check out some tips that might help parents at ConnectSafely.org. And moblogging (blogging by mobile phone) service Juicecaster has some for cellphone socializers themselves here.

Friends on phones

Switching cellphone carriers can really be hard on teens' relationships these days. "What was set up as a purely business strategy [encouraging customers to talk to people in the same network] is having an unintentional social effect" for better or worse, the New York Times reports. "It is dividing the people who share informal bonds and bringing together those who have formal networks of cellphone “'friends'.” Some parents worry that cellphone friendship groups will replace real-life ones, but one sociologist who's studied this told the Times the mobile ones tend to reflect the real-life ones quite closely (probably more so than friends lists in social Web sites, I would add). So it would follow that losing some phone access to real-life friends - maybe because Mom and Dad switch carriers - would have an effect on one's in-person social life. Some numbers in the article: The age group that talks on the phone most is 18-24 (they send and receive 290 calls/month on average). The group that text messages the most is 13-to-17-year-olds (435 messages a month, on average). "By contrast, cellphone users 45 to 54 years old spoke on the phone 194 times, on average, a month and sent only 57 text messages."

People-tracking phones

If you'd like to know more about global-positioning-enabled phones, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid surveyed the scene for the New York Times. He looks at the various child-tracking phones and services from Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Disney, and Wherify, as well as social-mapping services by Helio and Loopt that are very cool but not really for kids because they actually map users' physical location (with the users' permission). But on the flipside of this tech marvel is a story out of Australia illustrating the privacy concerns involved in countries where consumer privacy isn't a top priority. Australia's national security agency and "law enforcement agencies will be able to track the movement of people through their mobile phones secretly, without obtaining a court warrant, under new laws, legal and civil liberty groups are warning," Australian IT reports. Meanwhile, in the US, on the Web, and as privacy concerns grow, search engine companies are tightening their privacy policies, the Washington Post reports.

myNBC for TV fans

It's a social site for networking by fans of shows like "Heroes," "The Office," and "The Biggest Loser," a New York Times blog reports. Some analysts think it'll be successful, other think NBC should focus more on getting its content onto existing social networks - on "taking their programs to where people already are." I think, on this very fragmented medium called the social Web, both are right. I'm right now at the YPulse Mashup (conference) about "Totally Wired Teens" and hearing social media researcher danah boyd say that it's going more the way of "mobility" than "immersion" for online teens (fluid movement among multiple sites, media, technologies, and devices rather than immersion or brand/site/tech loyalty). I agree, so I think "mobility" means engaging with other "Heroes" fans in more than one place online. [For a great commentary on what happened at the Mashup, see PBS blogger Rob Glaser's report.]

Dad-created social site

Hmmm. I hope the Santa Cruz Sentinel does a followup story on this, because it’ll be interesting to see if a parent-created, parent-monitored site for teens – even with all the desirable features – will develop significant teen participation. Invitation-only Santa Cruz Teen Space – with “instant messaging, chat, online radio, Yahoo! videos, blogs, polls, games and event listings” – was created by 41-year-old computer programmer and father of two James Williams because he wanted his daughters and other local teens to have a safe alternative to other social sites, the Sentinel reports. “Members [so far there are 72] can format their own profiles as well as rate each other's attractiveness, send each other cyber high-fives and leave embarrassing face-to-face confessions behind by sending notification of a crush.” If people (under 18 only unless a parent) want to join but haven’t been invited, they can apply. Williams reviews the applications. The Sentinel doesn’t say how he verifies applicants’ ages or parents’ guardianship, unless by phone when he checks up on applicants (and people can lie on the phone as well as online). I suspect there will always be teens who make “safety” a priority (it’d be great if researchers could come up with a percentage in a future study), but I suspect that what MySpace and other social sites deliver is what I’d call social critical mass – e.g., everybody in one’s school (or one’s country, as with Lunarstorm.se in Sweden and Cyworld in South Korea) – and for most teens, having “everybody” there would be a higher priority. [Cyworld’s now has versions in the US and other countries, but the Korean one claims 90% of South Koreans under 20 – see this great blog post about it.]

Monitoring kid phone use

Fifteen-year-old Joshua has a fairly pricey Blackberry Pearl. Why? Because it runs Radar kid-monitoring software, CNET reports. “Initially, the Radar software, which costs about $10 a month on top of a wireless plan, has worked only with BlackBerry devices and other smart phones, a factor that has limited growth.” But its makers have struck deals with Verizon Wireless and Motorola that will make it available on more phones. As for Josh, anytime he “gets a call from someone not on a call list approved by his parents, they receive a real-time text alert on their cell phone or online,” according to CNET. Now if the software can just monitor kids’ photo- and video-sharing activities. (See the reference to “happy slapping” attacks in the BBC, whereby “assaults on children and adults are recorded on mobile phones and sent via video messaging” and examples in “We’re all on candid camera,” which ran in the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and BBC.)

Stalking: New fact of life?

“Stalking” isn’t necessarily as bad as it sounds. Say you’re single and someone lines up a blind date for you. You’d want to find out a little about him, right? So you “stalk him,” as the digital natives put it. To many social networkers, it’s a fun, innocuous sort of “background check,” to see who a person’s friends are, where her tastes lie, what she talks about, etc., and definitely what she looks like. Stalking has even become a bit of a cottage industry, the Associated Press reports (though I think the cottage industry is the more general “widgets” one, which includes all the little add-on enhancements that third-party companies are developing for the social-networking sites - see this item).

For example, 19-year-old Jared Kim, got the idea for Stalkerati.com at a backyard BBQ when his sister wanted to know who some guy was who had asked her out. Their geeky group of friends, who had all brought their laptops, “immediately turned to their keyboards to do a little cyberstalking,” according to the AP. So “Kim had a thought: Why not write a program that searches all the social-networking sites at once and creates a profile of the person you're searching for?” Kind of like the file a private investigator’s compiles for his client maybe? Within a month of the BBQ, Kim had put up the site, then word got out (in the blogosphere), and suddenly it had 10,000 visitors a day, the AP says (Kim also writes about this on his About page). Stalkerati was so much on the map, in fact, that MySpace noticed and blocked it as a security problem for its users (they had to give Stalkerati their MySpace passwords to use the info-gathering service). Facebook apparently allows it, but it’s my impression that this, social-networking, version of “stalking” was practically coined in Facebook. For more on this and online stalking's better-known darkside, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Cellphone safety

There are entertainment “thumb jocks” (videogamers) and then there are the communications ones, including cellphone texters at your house. Teens love texting, I think partly because of the extra privacy this silent form of communication affords them and partly because it can be 24x7 (see “Teen dating abuse”). They also love the growing number of features cellphones have, so they can snap and share photos, swap tunes and videos, customize with skins and ringtones, access social-networking profiles, and (with the GPS technology that new phones have) pinpoint their fellow texters’ physical locations - as well as text and talk with each other. More and more, reports Larry Magid in CBSNEWS.com, a cellphone is “really a personal computer for your pocket with all the benefits and dangers of PCs.” Therein lies the heads-up for parents, and Larry – who is also publisher of SafeKids.com and my co-director at BlogSafety.com – offers, in this article, the full complement of parental considerations where young cellphone users are concerned, from costs to carriers to content.

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….

Real-time (very) mobile dating

For some singles, apparently, going to a Web site and emailing back and forth before actually meeting someone is way too cumbersome. With the MeetMoi cellphone service, one can receive a potential date’s profile (that of a person who’s selected by MeetMoi for his/her physical proximity) via text message and set up an encounter minutes away. The Wall Street Journal calls this “instant Internet dating,” which can update you on nearby prospects as you move around. Zogo’s another such service, and the giant Web-based Match.com is adding this mobile capability to its service. Another example, Fast Flirting, “allows users to sign into a virtual ‘lobby’ where they can select a flirting partner based on factors such as age and location” for $3 a month. It’s new but there’s a market, the Journal says - 3.6 million US cellphone users having “accessed a dating service from their mobile phone in March.” But for it to really take off, of course, the market will also need to feel safe. There are safety mechanisms in place on many services (e.g., MeetMoi shares profiles without revealing actual location – users do that) but, if teens are using them, parents might want to ask if they’ve tried such services and are taking advantage of safety features.

Cyworld's 'video studio'

The social networking service that started in South Korea and launched in the US last summer is kicking video-sharing up a notch. Social Computing Magazine reports that it has launched its “Video Studio and Plaza, a forum for members to upload, edit, mix and share videos or photos.” With this feature, social producers or video sharers can use effects like “slow motion, cross-fades, color enhancements, and special effects.”

Defaming site: 3 teens accused

The profile, which was online for four days in February, impersonated the father of a classmate of one of its alleged creators and “featured a confederate flag and racial slurs,” the Carlisle (Penn.) Sentinel reports. The town police chief Alan Houck said he wasn’t sure why the kids created the MySpace page but thought they might’ve decided to “smear the family name” because of a disagreement with the son. He said he “intends to file identity theft and harassment charges against the teens unless the juveniles come forward to talk to him. In that case, Houck said, he may consider filing lesser charges.”

MySpace & the attorneys general

Eight state attorneys general Monday sent a letter to MySpace requesting that, by the end of the month, the social-networking site turn over data on registered sex offenders who use the site,” CNET reports. MySpace responded Tuesday that it was prepared to work with the attorneys general, but "its cooperation hinges on whether the state officials follow the law and subpoena the names, a step that a leader of the state attorneys general said was not necessary," the New York Times reports (MySpace was referring to a federal law basically barring disclosure of criminal records without a subpoena). The social-networking site also said it had "already taken down the profiles of thousands of sex offenders since the beginning of May when it began running its own database check." In an earlier statement, Nigam said MySpace “had launched software in early May to proactively identify and remove any known sex offenders from the site." The company's doing so using a national database of sex-offender data that it created with the help of ID-verification company Sentinel Tech. But even with that national list, finding all registered sex offenders is difficult without a law requiring them to register their email addresses and other online contact info. MySpace lobbied for such a law last year, and Sens. McCain and Schumer introduced legislation to this effect early this year (see my 12/8/06 item). The legislation’s still pending. Although eliminating all sex offenders on any social site would certainly help, not all pedophiles have been arrested and convicted. Too, MySpace is not the only social site where they could be active, and I wonder if the attorneys general plan to send similar letters to the many other social-networking sites that have teenage members.

State laws on age verification

Though people on both sides of the social Web’s age-verification debate have great intentions, opponents really seem to know more about what’s actually possible than proponents do. Proponents say things like, “if we can put a man on the moon, we can verify someone’s age,” the New York Times reports in an article about states proposing legislation requiring verification. Opponents or skeptics view it as overkill, what I’d call a baby+bathwater result (one opposing state legislator told the Times such a law is more like a sledgehammer where a “small mallet” would work better). ID verification companies say it’s not possible without a national database of children’s personal information (civil liberties and consumer privacy organizations would have some things to say about that – not to mention many parents). Child-safety advocates say it could potentially provide a false sense of security for parents and greater risk – if kids simply go to another site parents don’t know of that is less responsible to public opinion and parents’ requests than MySpace or other popular sites laws would cover. What the article doesn’t get into is all that’s in the bathwater these proposed laws are trying to address but don’t even begin to touch (see “Predators vs. cyberbullies” as well as “Verifying online kids’ ages”).

Web 2.0 is teen space: Study

The term “Web 2.0” gets tossed around a lot, and I often use “social Web” or “user-driven Web” to give parents a little clearer picture of it. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently decided to get a better fix on this new phase of the Web, as it’s so often called: who uses it and how they use it in the context of how they use the Internet and Net-connected devices in general. Pew’s just-released findings – in “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users” - only further confirmed what a lot of us suspected. The user-driven Web is the youth-driven Web. Only 19% of adult Internet users in the US say they’ve shared something online that they’ve created themselves (artwork, photos, stories, videos), which is what Web 2.0 is all about. “The typology clearly shows how modern information technology is the province of youth,” Pew found (p. 49). Meanwhile, market researcher Yankee Group just released its finding that "72% of US teens are actively logging onto social networking Web sites." Here’s CNET’s coverage of the Pew study.

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.

Prevention on the social Web

A tragic teen double-suicide case in Australia underscores the importance of loved ones and caregivers monitoring what at-risk youth say in their online profiles and blogs. Two 16-year-old girls in the Melbourne area apparently killed themselves in a suicide pact, posting "their own death notice – a farewell message to their online friends" in MySpace, The Star in Malaysia reports. The Star reporter seems to be making the assumption that "the idea of suicide emerged from the Internet," but I don't think the posting of a farewell message in a social site profile necessarily indicates this was where the girls' suicidal tendencies got started. Profiles and blogs are, however, the first places parents should check for what kids are really thinking if the latter are acting strangely at home. "The likelihood of a 'depressed, disaffected and disaffiliated' young person communicating with a soulmate online is a sure thing," The Star cites an Australian professor as saying. And there is certainly the possibility that at-risk people are getting the wrong kind of reinforcement online, such as sympathy or even promotion of destructive behavior from other people with mental health issues.

Facebook's 'Twitter' traits

Facebook users now have all the cellphone-Web "talking points" that the very hot mobile-social-networking service Twitter has, a Wired News blog reports. Users can not only update their profiles via cellphone, they can also have their Facebook friends' pokes and comments sent directly to their phones. Wired News says "the improvements are not simply a case of Facebook copying Twitter since the Status Updates feature has been available to Facebook users for nearly a year, still, with the addition of SMS support, the featureset is now nearly identical to that of Twitter."