News for the Week of May 28, 2006
Variations on the theme of social-networking were all over tech news this week. In fact, some trends are emerging...
Police on MySpace
Police officers "consider MySpace one of their best resources," reports the Sacramento Bee, in one of the first articles I've seen that lay out just how they use MySpace in investigations.
"Whether officers are dealing with serious crimes or with youngsters whose worst offenses are inappropriate insults, [police] travel a similar investigative path. Start with a name or an event or an area. Find a person connected to it and then drill down, through friends and friends of friends, visiting their sites, riffling through their pictures, reading the correspondence they display publicly, and making printouts of anything incriminating." Bullying is what they expect to see at the middle school level. As for high school, one officer is described as keeping "an eye out for parties that are announced to the world, letting patrol officers know where the big bashes will be." That officer "recently spotted a photo of a bong that led to a student's arrest on drug and weapons charges.. Even when youngsters use aliases, their pictures, their friends' sites or other details often make them easy to track down. And even when a student's own site is fairly innocent, his or her face can still turn up in someone else's photo album of raunchy parties or worse, captured in embarrassing or illegal moments."
But if teen MySpacers aren't yet thinking about police surveillance, they are responding to all the news reports about sexual predation. The Miami Herald reports that teens, "who often flirt with an adult world by pretending to be older than they actually are, are slowly stepping back into their teenage reality by revealing their true age and turning on [MySpace's] privacy filters. Anyone under 15 [actually 15 and 14, the official minimum age] automatically receives such filters." One 14-year-old told the Herald she doesn't even have an account "because of all the dangers that the Web site has." Other teens told Gannett New Jersey that media reports about the dangers are "overblown".
Social-networking with a purpose
This is a sign of things to come - purposeful online socializing, or niche social-networking. In this case, it's software that looks for expertise within a social group. According to the New York Times, each friend in a group installs the Illumio software on his/her computer. Then, when someone has a question about anything - e.g., "Who knows John Smith?" or "Who know the lyrics to (a particular song)?" - the software searches all the hard drives in the group with either MSN or Google desktop search technology, looking for the person who has the most references to that subject in email, documents, etc. Then it asks the person with the most info on the subject if it's ok to tell the group s/he knows the most. If the person says yes, the questioner gets the results, if not, the software asks the next most knowledgeable person for permission, and so on down the line in what's called a "reverse auction systems," the Times reports. The other types of niche social-networking already in place revolved more around specific subjects (a genre of music, SN for a particular age groups like teens) rather than specific purposes.
Then there's the women 25-45 niche that Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's going after. Scheduled to launch second half of 2007, Martha's social-networking site will "allow members to share photographs, scrapbooks, recipes and similar projects with one another and home design experts," Reuters reports.
In Other News...
- WindowsOneCare goes live. Microsoft's new PC security aid, which it describes as "all-in-one protection and maintenance service for your Windows XP PC," is now yours for $49.95/year (for up to three family PCs). Some may balk at paying that, but "there are plenty of users who will and probably should avail themselves of this product," according to Washington Post PC security columnist Brian Krebs. One plus: "Microsoft has said it will offer free phone, online chat or email support to all customers, a feature that is mostly lacking at the moment for consumer anti-virus products." According to the BBC, OneCare "is aimed at consumers and small businesses which currently have only the most basic protection against net-borne threats. Microsoft said up to 70% of consumers either have no security software on their PC or have programs that are no longer updated."
- Users' Web. If anyone's still in doubt that the Web is increasingly what its users are making it, the latest Pew Internet & American Life study might add some clarity. "User-Generated Content and Interactivity at the Cutting Edge" is one of the headlines, and another is "Home broadband adoption is going mainstream and that means user-generated content is coming from all kinds of internet users." Thirty-five percent of all Net users have posted content to the internet," the study found. For most of these (26%), it's something they've created - artwork, photos, stories, or videos; next it's their own Web page (14%); then a blog or Web page for friends, groups belonged to, or work (13%); finally, it's one's own online journal or blog (8%). In all, about 31 million people have posted content to the Internet, and this "user-generated" Web is driven by "young home high-speed Internet users" - people under 30.
- Financial firms help fight child porn. We now know a little more about how credit card companies and banks will help in the anti-child porn fight (find coverage of the announcement in my 3/17 issue). The Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography "will report child porn sites they discover on the Web to a central tip line, slated to expand next month to receive the information," USATODAY reports. That's the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline that's expanding for this type of reporting (it has been accepting reports and talking with parents and other individuals since its inception). The coalition members - Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup, and PayPal - will also "block transactions for online child porn or, if law enforcement opens an investigation, help track sellers and buyers," USATODAY adds.
- Wrong kind of support. Depending on a user's intent, MySpace is "as wholesome as cheerleading and baseball, or as troubling as guns, sex and drugs," reports ABC's Primetime. It zooms in on 12-year-old Sarah, a middle school student in the Midwest, who was "desperate to belong, trying to cope with the typical insecurities and growing pains that come with being a preteen." She told Primetime she was friendless and wanted to be like the stoned kid in the back of the bus who didn't even care about what was going on around him. So she went online and "found plenty of outsiders like herself." She had "started experimenting with drugs before joining MySpace but getting online created a whole new world of possibilities. This is not new to the Web, though. For years, bulimics and anorexics have found "support" in "pro-mia" and "pro-ana" community sites (see this New York Times article of 9/02).
