News for the Week of September 10, 2006
Facebook, the social network so far largely associated with college life, was all over youth-tech news this past week, and parents of teens will want to be filled in because of our first story this week...
Facebook to open up
Soon all people will need to sign up at Facebook is a valid email address. First they needed one ending with ".edu," then they needed to be a high school student invited in by another student; next Facebook opened up to selected networks in workplaces. The latest is that "Facebook will soon be allowing anyone with a valid email address to sign up on the site and join a regional network," USATODAY reports. "It will launch just over 500 networks in the USA and abroad." It's an entirely different development, but given members' very vocal reaction to the last new development at Facebook (see below), it'll be interesting to see how this goes over. "Students especially have grown to see Facebook as their private homes online. And this move could make them feel like they've lost that," according to USATODAY. Facebook meant to announce this development last week, but a major controversy intervened...
Big Facebook flap
For its users, Facebook crossed a line. A protest group of them called Students Against Facebook News Feed said Facebook violated user privacy rights by aggregating info users already make publicly available into a "news feed" that alerts people on their friends lists to even the smallest updates on their pages so the recipients don't have to dig around. "By late on Wednesday [9/6], more than 500,000 of Facebook's 9.5 million members had signed an online petition" against the new feature, MIT's Technology Review reported. What made this mainstream news was that 1) this is the first time social networkers themselves have spoken out about protecting their own privacy, and 2) Facebook is in the headlines instead of MySpace! Within about two days of protests, Facebook announced it would soon be giving users more control over their info (though users who had the strictest privacy settings turned on weren't in news feeds), the Washington Post reported ), and on Friday announced the new features, a San Francisco Chronicle blog reported ). But before mainstream news outlets picked it up, the story was in campus newspapers nationwide.
Limited exposure, pls
Many social networkers like their fishbowl a little cloudy, thank you. That's what they (we all) learned from the Facebook flap, as summed up by one user, who told the New York Times that, where their online lives were concerned, "translucent is good," transparent isn't. "Those who study social networking sites say that users' comfort with revealing intimate details about themselves comes in part from a perception that in the din of life online, there is a kind of privacy through anonymity," the writer wrote. In other words, you're a little *more* anonymous if people have to come find your news than if it gets broadcast to all your friends as it breaks! A lot of parents will find it a relief to know that there are limits to the appeal of self-exposure on blogging and social-networking sites.
In other news...
- Teen YouTube 'star' quits. If you worry that young social networkers, videographers, or bloggers in your life are fixated on fame, it might help to give them the story of 18-year-old YouTube star "Emmalina" in the Sydney Morning Herald . "The chatty video blog entries recorded from her bedroom first began to appear in the 'most viewed' rankings . in June and some of her more controversial posts attracted more than 300,000 views.. Her spectacular rise to Internet fame gave rise to a multitude of YouTube dedications, spin-offs and spoofs, as well as a rap song dedicated to her popularity." But she's now an ex-YouTube star. She quit. She deleted her profile and all her videos from the site because, along with the fame and adulation came "cruel spoofs, harassing videos, death and rape threats, [and] incredibly nasty comments," she told the Morning Herald. People also hacked into her computer and stole private photos, videos, and information and posted them online.
- Out-sourcing term papers. I'll tell you the verdict right up front, so you can pass it on to any student you know: Don't do it, people! As tempting as it might be to have the likes of SuperiorPapers.com or TermPaperRelief.com[pls insert links] do their work for them, they'd be paying good money for dreck, the New York Times found . The Times got an English professor to look at one out-sourced paper, and his response was that if he were "confronted with such a paper from one of his own students . he probably wouldn't grade it at all but would instead say 'come see me' (shuddering at the prospect)." I suspect the student, too, would be shuddering.
- WoW: No. 1 online game. World of Warcraft, is an Irvine, Calif.-based online game that, with nearly 7 million subscribers worldwide, is expected to make more than $1 billion this year. "That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind," the New York Times reports . "Like the iPod, World of Warcraft has essentially taken over and redefined an entire product category." WoW launched less than two years ago and is now played in five languages, with a sixth in development. Unlike other US-based games, such as Grand Theft Auto, this one seems to connect with and connect people across cultural barriers.
- eDonkey bites dust. Another file-sharing service - by which people can download free but copyrighted music and other media - settled this week. "The firm behind popular online file-sharing software eDonkey has agreed to pay $30 million to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry," the Associated Press reports . The company, MetaMachine, Inc., was one of seven companies to receive warning letters from the RIAA. BearShare, i2Hub, WinMX, Grokster, and Kazaa have also settled.
- Britons into socializing online! Social networking is fast moving up the UK's Web traffic charts. Several of what the traffic measurers at comScore call "UGC" (for user-generated content) sites have fairly suddenly moved up into Britain's Top 50. "The top UGC property, Wikipedia Sites, ranked as the 16th most visited property in July with 6.5 million visitors (up 253% versus year ago)," comScore reports . You'll notice some familiar names now: MySpace.com (up 467% to 5.2 million visitors), Piczo.com (up 393% to 4 million visitors), YouTube.com (3.9 million visitors), and Bebo.com (up 328% to 3.9 million visitors).
