News for the Week of November 19, 2006
Cellphone-based socializing, tracking, etc. is all over kid-tech news these days. For example.
Very mobile social networking
You might call it real-time, real-life social networking. Silicon Valley start-up loopt has launched a new phone 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 on the Web.
Virtual worlds on phones
Picture this: whole virtual worlds on phones, sort of SecondLife meets MySpace meets loopt. A San Mateo, Calif.-based company called Gemini Mobile plans to provide cellphone companies like Cingular and Verizon software that allows their customers to interact in virtual worlds. The first company to bite is Softbank Mobile in Japan, which "created the S! Town online village community," InsideBayArea.com reports. "In S! Town, users [using a phone with the Gemini software] move in a 3-D world as avatars, and chat online as well as talk to each other through the voice connection of the phone. They share photos with other S! Town visitors and shop at retailers posting on S! Town." In other words, just another form of social networking on phones.
Cellphone as tracking device
People's thinking about the pluses and minuses of using phones to track their locations is changing. GPS (Global Positioning System) on phones has been around a while, but so far the significant privacy concerns have outweighed the upside, according to a thoughtful commentary in the New York Times, as attractive as the latter can be: "Maps on our phones will always know where we are. Our children can't go missing. Movie listings will always be for the closest theaters; restaurant suggestions, organized by proximity. We will even have the option of choosing free cellphone service if we agree to accept ads focused on nearby businesses." But then there's the hypothetical 16-year-old customer described to the writer by a Verizon spokesperson, who "said it was one thing for the customer to imprudently send out her e-mail address to a stranger, and still another for her phone to reveal her home's location." Yes, we may be able to track our kids when they're carrying these phones, but so can others. The New York Times article goes into the unregulated realities of this business, offering great background for parents trying to get a handle on what mobile tracking and socializing means for children's (and everybody's) privacy.
To me, these are further signs 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.
In other news...
- Schools' dilemma - filter or educate? Student social networking has schools in a bit of a quandary, a new survey suggests. Thirty-six percent of school officials polled recently said students' use of social sites is "disruptive" at school, but at least half of school districts don't yet have policies addressing student use of such sites, eSchool News reports, citing an email survey the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent out to people attending its annual Tech + Learning Conference in Dallas earlier this month. "In schools where there is one, the most common policy appears to be simply blocking access to social sites, according to eSchool News. In this and various news reports, I'm seeing a growing number of educators and legal experts saying that not only is merely filtering ineffective (with all the workarounds students are aware of), but it spells missed opportunities to teach students safe, responsible use of the social Web. Among the experts saying this who are cited in this meaty, in-depth article are Anne Bryant, executive director of the NSBA and Harold Rowe, associate superintendent for technology at the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Texas.
- 'Second Life,' second campus? Educators are beginning to explore the idea of virtual worlds like Second Life as learning environments, CNN reports. People socialize, buy and sell products, advertising, and real estate, build stores, design clothes, and even operate news bureaus (e.g., Reuters in SecondLife.com) in alternate-reality games like Second Life and Entropia - why not take classes? "More than 60 schools and educational organizations have set up shop in the virtual world and are exploring ways it can be used to promote learning. The three-dimensional virtual world makes it possible for students taking a distance course to develop a real sense of community," CNN cites one educator as saying. The article is referring mostly to educators at the university level, it appears, which is probably good, because virtual worlds often include red light districts.
- France: Skyrock's social ambitions. Not surprisingly, Skyblog.com taught its parent Skyrock (a hip-hop radio station popular among French youth) the power and "universal potential" of the social Web, the International Herald Tribune reports. Now Skyblog - which gets 11.1 million visitors a month and gained "a measure of notoriety when some of its young bloggers urged French youths to revolt against the police in the midst of disturbances in the Parisian suburbs last year" - is expanding linguistically to include communities in German, English, and Spanish. "Skyblog is unusual in its global ambitions to target a multinational youth network," according to the Herald Tribune. I'm not so sure this isn't what MySpace has in mind too, with its goal of being in 11 countries by next April 1, but it is possible that Skyblog plans to mash up the cultures and languages it embraces more than other social sites, something that one of the Herald Trib's sources said will not be easy. The French company does have a leg up, though, because it has appealed to the French diaspora, from primarily French-language countries like Belgium to French speakers in Spain, Germany, the US, Morocco, and most probably other French-speaking countries in Africa.
