News for the Week of September 30, 2007
Topping youth-tech news this week is a program by the New Jersey attorney general that outlines how social-networking sites should handle abuse reports.
AG's 'Report Abuse' button
The New Jersey attorney general has drafted a plan that calls for social-networking sites to add a "Report Abuse" button at the bottom of every page while outlining how the site should investigate those claims, NJ.com reports. New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram told a Gannett New Jersey reporter that her plan "will give users a standard form to report concerns such as suspected child predators or violent or sexually explicit material. Anyone who files a complaint will receive a confirmation number and contact information they can use to follow up on their report."
New Jersey-based myYearbook.com and six niche sites run by CommunityConnect have adopted General Milgram's program so far. At first glance, the program makes a lot of sense, but there are some key drawbacks: this is the program of a single US state, and social-networking sites are highly international; a number of sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and Hi5, already have such systems in place; and, practically speaking, it's not a hot button that makes sites responsive, it's the customer-service system behind it that does.
MySpace responds
A better idea would be industry-wide, uniform best practices for abuse reporting and response to which all such sites agree to comply. But let's hear from a social site itself about this. The Courier-Post reported that MySpace hadn't returned its call about this, so I contacted MySpace as to whether this program would make sense for its service and social sites in general. Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's (and Fox Interactive's) chief security officer responded that...
- MySpace already has a report abuse button "on the bottom of every profile and in key areas of our site."
- MySpace's system is more granular ("users can choose the type of problem they are reporting).
- "These reports are then handled by a trained customer-care group - each company is unique with a unique user base and set of issues."
- "We are an international site that must handle reports from citizens around the world - a New Jersey-centric button fails to recognize the reality of the Internet"
- "A singular process doesn't work - guiding principles in this area would be more successful rather than prescriptive requirements."
Mr. Nigam added that MySpace wasn't contacted by the New Jersey attorney general's office about the program - the company first heard about it in the news media.
In other news...
- 'What kids like to do online.' Fun article at Slate.com by mom and author Emily Yoffe, who polled her 11-year-old's peer group about the question implied in the headline. Among other things, the "focus group" confirmed (qualitatively, anyway) my suspicion that one of the appeals (for the kids) of online play is that it's just kid stuff right now - Mom or Dad can't possibly know about all the sites they use and if s/he does, s/he doesn't have time to keep up with all their ins and outs. It'll be a while before we catch up with our digerati, kids know very well.
Anyway, with the group, Emily visits several tween-targeting virtual-world sites that have some things in common, including buying stuff for your avatar with virtual money. "To purchase this fake clothing and furniture [in virtual world sites] requires fake money, and to earn it, players are required to play a series of arcade-style games. What better lesson can we teach our kids: If you've just blown through your home-equity loan, you can always avoid bankruptcy by spending a couple of days in Vegas." The kids, she found, don't ask Mom or Dad to pay for the paid version of these sites because that would only "draw undue attention to [the kids' online] leisure activities." So her daughter and friends currently prefer a site by General Mills called Millsberry.com. - Zooming in on ClubPenguin. Slate.com associate editor Michael Agger's experience on Club Penguin was quite different from the impressions left by Emily Yoffe's "focus group" of 11-year-olds. Michael spent enough time in ClubPenguin to observe various behavioral patterns, to understand how the safety features work, and to go a little flippy on the iceberg that penguin urban legend says might tip if enough penguins stand on one side of it.
As for behaviors, he notes: "Club Penguin may be heavily monitored, but, similar to school, messing with the authority figures is part of the fun... Club Penguin regulars seem to enjoy their outlaw status, posting videos on YouTube of how they got the boot. Better yet are the tribute videos to banned penguins. This one uses the Puffy Combs ode to Biggie Smalls, 'I'll Be Missing You,' as a soundtrack." - Mobile books hot in Japan. "They say kids these days don't read. In Japan, however, teens are back into reading novels big-time with one major difference: They're reading them on cell phones," reports Switched.com. Keitai ("kay-tie") are serial novels amazingly written by their mostly young authors on their cellphone keypads (shows how fast Asia's phone text-based communicators' thumbs are). They're "delivered in read-on-the-corner byte-sized chunks on a regular basis to hungry young subscribers, and the style is - predictably - manga (Japanese comic book) style. One 20-something author who was writing for 25,000 readers a day sold her novel to a book publisher, and the book sold 440,000, according to Switched.com.
- Social networkers' virtual dossiers. Bet you didn't know that there's probably a "dossier" on any social networkers you know out there on the Web. The Detroit Free Press talked to the CEO of a new service called PeekYou, which is basically "a people search engine. And if you have a profile on one of the many social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, it's being tracked and aggregated and used to compile a virtual dossier on you." The company, which aims to be the Web version of the phone white pages, already has about 50 million profiles in its database. "What does that mean? If you are in one of the social networking sites, running your name through PeekYou aggregates all the info into a profile that can be ... well, pretty revealing." PeekYou will remove a person's profile, but only if they ask to be removed, so to protect their privacy they have to know about PeekYou.
