Social Network for Kids

A Safe Social Network for Kids

Since it seems that nearly everyone is on Facebook, it is natural that kids would want to get on the site that their older siblings, parents and even grandparents consider fun. The content on Facebook, however, is not geared toward children. In fact, Facebook actually has a policy that prevents children under the age of 13 from joining the site. It also strongly recommends parental participation with minors.Since kids always find ways to do what they want, many children are joining the site by lying about their age, which is a growing concern for parents. First Lady Michelle Obama is one of those concerned parents and even said on The Today Show that she didn’t want either of her girls on Facebook.

Social networking site Everloop hopes to provide a solution for both parents and children. It is said to be just like Facebook but with content that is geared toward children between the ages of 8-13. In addition, it contains controls for parents that allow them to monitor what their children are doing on the site.“One of the things that Everloop is solving is really giving children under the age of 13 their own social utility, or what we call, their own social graph,” said Tim Donovan, Everloop’s CSO.
Everloop is in compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which means that a parent must authenticate a child before it is permitted on the site. This compliance also ensures that Everloop cannot gather personal information from kids for marketing purposes. Getting parental consent additionally helps prevent sexual predators from obtaining access to the site.
For children, the experience is very similar to that of a user on Facebook. Children have access to a video network and game arcade, and they can create and join groups based on entertainment, learning, and more. They can also customize their own profiles and can take part in IM chatting, SMS, and VoIP.
“Right now, a child under 13, their community experience is disparate. So, they go to YouTube to watch videos, they’ll go to Nickelodeon to or Disney XD to play casual games, they’ll go to Facebook and they’ll sneak onto Facebook to be part of a larger social experience, so we’re collapsing all of that into one experience on Everloop,” said Donovan.
Parents can also customize what their child does on Everloop and give him or her the power to email, IM, chat, etc. They can also enable reporting settings that notify them when their child takes certain actions on the site.
“How do I keep my child’s privacy and information protected? How do I have more insight into the activities that my child is engaged in when they’re online? How do I have more controls over their behavior and their engagement in the social community? So, Everloop solves all those problems for parents,” Donovan points out.
Not only does Everloop want to give parents control and make the process convenient for them, but it also wants to let children feel like they have control as well. If children didn’t have some level of power, they would not be interested in the site at all. Donovan also said that Everloop has to be as cool as Facebook in order to attract kids.
“The bottom line is this, if it’s not cool, kids won’t use it. So, coolness comes from being relevant, coolness comes from having the bleeding edge of technology, coolness comes from… thousands and thousands of opportunities and experiences,” he said.
Everloop also recently announced that it is partnering with i-Safe, the leading publisher of media literacy and educator of digital citizenship, in an effort to bring social media to the classroom. The two organizations will begin to roll out their platform in April.

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Google Vs. Bing: Competition Is Heating Up

Google Vs. Bing: Competition Is Heating Up

You’ve probably heard by now that Google  recently accused Microsoft’s Bing of stealing its search results. Bing (sort of) denied the claim but came back and accused Google of click fraud, the practice often associated with spammers. A back-and-forth stream of strong words and accusations has resulted thus beginning, what appears to be, a long drawn-out saga.

It all began when Danny Sullivan published an article exposing a Google experiment in which it tested Bing. According to Michael Gray of Atlas Web Service, the test, essentially, showed that Bing used the data from Google’s toolbar to duplicate its search results, a move that Google considers “copying.”

Gray went on to explain to WebProNews that the accusation of click fraud is “a little far-reaching.” Although the technology was the same, it didn’t cost Bing any money since there weren’t any PPC campaigns involved. He said that if Google did suspect that Bing was copying them, this method was the only way it would have found out the truth. So, who’s right, and who’s wrong? Gray believes that both companies are in the wrong to an extent. Based on his analysis, Microsoft was wrong to take the data from the toolbar and use it in their ranking algorithm without testing it further.

Google’s wrongdoing, on the other hand, stems from past events. As he explains, Ask introduced universal search long before Google did, and Yahoo introduced Yahoo Instant long before Google released its version of it. In addition, Gray points out that Google seems to make product announcements at other people’s press events and play it off as a coincidence. Although Google, typically, says that it has been working on these products for long periods of time, some people interpret their actions in each of these scenarios differently.The timing of this latest turn of events seemed to be somewhat of a coincidence as well since Sullivan’s article was published just before both companies were set to take the stage at the Farsight Summit.

“Google’s playing hardball and they’re a serious, competitive company; they like to hold onto their market share, and they’re not taking things laying down,” he said.As for the lesson for marketers in all this, Gray said that marketers need to expand their efforts beyond SEO to include other areas, such as social media.He also pointed out that this situation is “good news for Bing” because it means that Google considers them as a viable competitor.

How do you think this saga will play out, and how will it impact the search industry?