News for the Week of September 17, 2006
The rapid, youth-driven growth of the social Web has been all over tech news lately, and the business world has noticed! Now we're seeing social sites on all sorts of subjects popping up all over the place...
Social sites multiplying like...
Remember the gophers in Caddyshack? Or much more recently the amazing number of rabbits with which Wallace and Gromit were confronted in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit? Well, there are certain animal-rich scenes in them that come to mind every time I check email these days. Press releases about new social-networking sites are multiplying exponentially. Here are just a few of the categories:
- Family social networking. Famster.com claims to provide safe, secure social networking for families, as does MyGoodFriends.com (SweetSecond.com provides "social networking for divorced singles"). The more general security-focused social site Multiply.com, too, is a natural for staying in touch with family and close friends in a multimedia sort of way. Many more examples are linked to in my item last June, "Family-networking sites".
- Social gaming. This is actually nothing new to gamers, but a lot of mainstream reporters aren't aware of how social online games have always been, with discussion boards and chat so much a part of the experience. The Associated Press's "Social networking comes to casual games" is for a different category of gamer (women) and is really about a viral-marketing-disguised-as-social-networking strategy on the part of BigFishGames.com (the way online marketing is going across the board, I think). It's time to begin taking the term "social networking" with a large grain of salt.
- Location-based SN. And another brand-new category: geographically-based (Boston), "event-driven" social networking at heyletsgo.com, whose tagline is: "What's Happening. Who's Going." These, like gophers at a golf course, are popping up all over the place; see also Dodgeball.com, Meetro.com (both mentioned in the CNET piece above). And parents, you should know that not just adults but kids, too, can reach out to strangers in cybercafes and wi-fi hotspots by going to sites like Placesite.com and Jambo.com. They're very cool but, like most technologies, also have a downside where children, who are the earliest of adopters, are involved.
- Social traveling. WAYN.com (for "where are you now") could be in the last category, or it could be in this one - it's a way to connect with people in a location to which you're traveling. Another travel-oriented site is TripConnect.com, which calls itself "the Internet's first-of-its kind social networking site for travel advice".
- Social shopping. This week the New York Times reported on how shopping online is getting social (it's kind of social armchair shopping): "These sites are hoping to ride the MySpace wave by gathering people in one place to swap shopping ideas. And like MySpace, the sites are designed for both browsing and blogging, with some shopping-related technology twists included."
- Talking sports. As is no surprise, there are all kinds of sports sites emerging and calling themselves social networks: e.g., FanSpot.com, a kind of MySpace of sport; YourSportsFan.com also embracing non-mainstream sports; Joga.com, "for soccer players dedicated to keeping the game beautiful"; Takkle.com for high school sports; Fans-NHL.com in beta; TheAlarmClock.com; EveryTeam.com; etc.
In other news...
- Key PC security advice. A newly discovered flaw in Internet Explorer can render family PCs vulnerable to some nasty hacks, the Washington Post reports . Just by going to some Web sites with Explorer, a user can download "an entire kitchen sink of malicious software." Right now it's just a handful of sites, mostly those publishing pornography, but that number is expected to grow, and porn won't be the only kind of site serving up these nasties: e.g., "the incredibly invasive Spybot worm," trojan software that takes control of PCs, and keylogger software that records every key stroke. Post security writer Brian Krebs has advice in the article about how to protect your family PC (and Microsoft will be providing a patch soon).
- Online school in demand. Interest in online-only high school in the state of Washington definitely exceeded expectations, the Seattle Times reports. They were expecting maybe 250 or 300 students and each got about 650, with hundreds wait-listed or in the application pipeline. Washington's "two newest online schools" are Insight High School and Washington Virtual Academy, which is K-8. And who are these applicants? "About one-quarter of Insight School's students previously were home-schooled... Some had dropped out of high school. Some don't like the high-school social scene. Others want the flexibility of the online schedule so they can hold down jobs, or, in a few cases, because they're elite athletes who have an extensive training and travel schedule."
- Social Web: Early warning system? People who want to ban the social networks might consider what can be learned on them about at-risk youth. Peers and adults can detect and have found threats in blogs and profiles in time to avert violence, and law-enforcement people certainly are monitoring the sites. The challenge is the obscurity of some of them, such as VampireFreaks.com, where shooter Kimveer Gill posted many hints about violent intentions (he committed the mass shooting at Dawson College in Montreal last week), New Criminologist reports . The Ottawa Sun looks at the importance of early detection . It mentions the arrest of two 17-year-old Wisconsin teens after threats of violence they allegedly made were reported to the principal of their school. "Officers found guns, homemade bombs, ammunition, mannequin heads used for target practice and even suicide notes written by the pair in their homes. They were depressed, hated school and felt like outcasts." Monitoring social sites can also aid the detection of suicidal tendencies, the US's National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told us (it has profiles on MySpace where teens can get their friends help), as well as of eating disorders, self-mutilation, and substance abuse.
