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Parents, you’re not just focusing on FB, right?

October 13, 2010 By Anne 4 Comments

It’s great that parents are getting the message that they can monitor their kids on Facebook by joining it, but they also need to remember that Facebook isn’t the all of teen online socializing (even though it’s in the news a lot!). It’s just the big social utility that aggregates basically “everybody” in teens’ real-world school and social lives. But there’s plenty more social activity happening in other sites and services too. A recent blog post at TrendMicro looks at that growing social site segmentation, zooming in on three additional spaces teens reportedly frequent: MyYearbook.com (a social network site popular with high school students), Meez.com (avatar chat and games, where avatars visit each other’s “roomz”), and IMVU.com (targeted at and probably more appropriate for 18-to-24-year-olds). There are also countless gaming and virtual world sites kids and teens love (they usually just call them all “games”). I don’t think any of this is an either-or proposition; kids just use different sites, apps, and services for different things, just as we do – online as well as offline.

As for those beyond-FB activities, a brand-new app has launched for parents to monitor kids’ online gaming from their (parents’) Facebook profiles: Piggyback, which is madly signing up game and VW partners as you read this. Launch partners include Whyville.net, PlanetCazmo.com, and Woozworld.com. What I like about this monitoring is that it doesn’t just focus on potential negative stuff. “Parents get an overview of their children’s activities on partner sites, receive safety alerts, have access to game-specific reports and get notifications about their children’s in-game achievements. Piggyback promises always-on monitoring and a way for parents to reward good behaviors with site-appropriate virtual goods and currency, including Facebook Credits,” Mashable reports. Facebook Credits are the site’s own virtual currency, which can now be purchased in the form of gift cards at retail stores such as Target and used to buy virtual objects in Facebook-based games such as Farmville (more detail at Mashable). [For more on in-site monitoring, see “Moms’ tech concerns & countermeasures” and “Facebook: No. 1 tool for parenting? Maybe. Use wisely.“]

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Filed Under: Parenting, Risk & Safety, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, FarmVille, IMVU, meez, monitoring, myYearbook, Parenting, Piggyback, PlanetCazmo, Social Media, TrendMicro, Whyville.net, Woozworld

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Comments

  1. Tim D says

    October 13, 2010 at 7:31 pm

    Parent should also look into offering their kids access to social networks which have been designed for kids and tweens from the ground up. Everloop has the most comprehensive parental controls, privacy features, user authentication and moderation than any other social utility on the market today. Something to consider when evaluating social networking options.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. A window onto family Facebook use: Study - Connect Safely says:
    April 29, 2013 at 10:46 pm

    […] Eighty percent of US parents of teens have a social networking account; of those parents, 95% have Facebook accounts; and of that 95%, the vast majority (86%) are friends with their teens in Facebook. Interestingly, in those households where both a parent and a teen have Facebook accounts, more than a third of the teens said they got their parent to join Facebook,” reports TRUSTe, which commissioned the study of 2,000 parents and teens by Lightspeed Research. TRUSTe, the privacy policy certification company, didn’t appear to ask the teen respondents why they got their parents to join Facebook, but I imagine it was to ease parental concerns about social networking – not that FB is the all of teen social networking (see “Parents, you’re not just focusing on FB, right?”). […]

    Reply
  2. A window onto family Facebook use: TRUSTe study | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    October 18, 2010 at 4:12 pm

    […] Eighty percent of US parents of teens have a social networking account; of those parents, 95% have Facebook accounts; and of that 95%, the vast majority (86%) are friends with their teens in Facebook. Interestingly, in those households where both a parent and a teen have Facebook accounts, more than a third of the teens said they got their parent to join Facebook,” reports TRUSTe, which commissioned the study of 2,000 parents and teens by Lightspeed Research. TRUSTe, the privacy policy certification company, didn’t appear to ask the teen respondents why they got their parents to join Facebook, but I imagine it was to ease parental concerns about social networking – not that FB is the all of teen social networking (see “Parents, you’re not just focusing on FB, right?”). […]

    Reply
  3. Tweets that mention Parents, you’re not just focusing on FB, right? | NetFamilyNews.org -- Topsy.com says:
    October 13, 2010 at 3:58 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by annecollier, Chase Straight and The KidSafe Team, Tim Woda. Tim Woda said: Parents, you’re not just focusing on FB, right?: It’s great that parents are getting the message that they can mon… http://bit.ly/9mqIE7 […]

    Reply

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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