You might call it real-time, real-life social networking. Today Silicon Valley start-up loopt launched a new mobile social-networking service with Boost Mobile, “one of the nation’s biggest youth-oriented wireless phone companies,” the San Jose Mercury News reports. “Boost’s 3.8 million customers – who are mostly under 25 – will be able to create groups of friends and keep track of them using a combination of text messaging, pictures and the GPS technology embedded in most new mobile phones today.” Let’s make that crystal clear: young people using this service will be able to know their friends’ exact physical location so that they can socialize with them offline, in what we digital immigrants call “real life.” This is new territory for online safety, which loopt’s 17 employees are well aware of (they’ve already reached out to us and other online-safety specialists). “Loopt has strict privacy and security safeguards, including requirements that friends must be invited and accept each other,” reports the Mercury News. Other services in this vein are Google’s Dodgeball (see InformationWeek) and Microsoft’s SLAM tech (see the Gizmodo blog). It’s different from MySpace Mobile, which provides phone access to one’s MySpace profile and keeps the socializing online.
To me, this is yet another sign that online safety is more and more about social engineering and less about safety technologies like filters. In other words, we need to teach our kids how not to be tricked or “engineered” to add undesirable people to friends lists and click on undesirable links. The other “next big thing” for online safety, I think, points to the same educational need: the social scene in virtual or alternate worlds such as SecondLife.com, Teen.SecondLife.com, EntropiaUniverse.com, and Xbox Live chat-enabled videogames (see this item on Entropia and Wikipedia on the Second Life games).
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