You Diligence

Finding it difficult to keep up with all of your child’s social networking pages–like MySpace and Facebook. Worried about what people might be discussing or posting on his page? Afraid your child may be being bullied but won’t talk to you about it?

YouDiligence is a new service that allows you to receive emails when pre-selected words are used on your child’s social network account page. For example, words referring to weapons/violence, drug use, bullying, obscenity, slurs, or sexually explicit languate can be screened for. You can also add personalized words or terms.The service is customizable to allow for differing levels of parental comfort.

When one of the terms appears on your child’s page, you recieve an email containing the word, the context in which is it used and a link to the page where it appears.

To use the service, you must know your child’s login information and have been friended by them on the applicable website.  YouDiligence encourages parents to have open communication with their children and to set boundaries and discuss that you reserve the right to check their pages if you find something troubling.

Another service is the SlangSpotter e-newsletter which helps parents stay up on the latest slang terms to maintain your “POS” position (Parent-over-shoulder).

Of course, there will be parent who wonder if this is an invasion of their child’s privacy to which the site responds:

Q: Is this violating my child’s privacy?

A: All of this material is being posted on the internet by your child and his/her friends. Anyone can gain access to it. With incidents popping up weekly from bullying, to fighting, to sexual predators coming after unsuspecting tweens and teens, it only makes sense to review their internet activity, especially in a responsible way like this. YouDiligence is effective and efficient, and will alert you to when you need to go take a closer look at your child’s site

Remember that what you child posts on the Internet is out there forever, for everyone anyway. At least if they think you might be watching they will think twice about what they post.

The service runs $9.99/month or $14.99 for a family plan.

Another Facebook Update

Just a quick update on the Great Facebook Experiment:

- I now have 112 friends

- The first girl I ever had a crush on has found me. Too bad she’s married…

- What am I supposed to do when somebody buys me online drinks? WHat the hell is a Lil Green Patch? And I don’t even want to know about “kidnapping” or “poking”.

Seriously folks - exchaging vacation pictures is one thing, but sending imaginary farm animals to someone crosses a whole new line…

Could Facebook dash your child’s college dream?

If you needed another reason to help your kids monitor what they write and do on Facebook, MySpace and other networking sites, consider this: 10 percent of college admissions counselors at prestigious universities say they check out potential students pages and 38 percent say they have rejected a student based on what they found.

You should know some colleges do consider the pages off-limits in decision making and personal, but others are looking. Regardless of whether your child’s college admissions office views them, odds are good that future employers might.

With more and more of our lives being available on-line, personal privacy and restraint is more necessary than ever. Teach your children the importance of using privacy options on MySpace and Facebook and check to make sure they are.  Remind them not to post anything they wouldn’t want their parents or their future teachers or employers looking at. It could save their education or their career.

Lets Face It

Facebook.  It’s not a gadget per se, but it deserves discussion .  There are so many assumptions and conflicts surrounding social networks now that sometimes the real reason and use of the things just disappear.

First, of all the social networks  (popular ones including: Myspace, Twitter, Friendster, and Friendfeed) I’m a Facebook user.  So, this post is going to focus on the Facebook specifics, though many of the main points apply to all social networks in general.

Lets be clear, Facebook started as a web site meant to link college students, and then moved to allow high school students, and finally to the world in general.  So, in the beginning, Facebook had everything right.  Not to be self centered, but who needs a simple way to stay connected more than college age students?  Who could learn to use Facebook faster than teenagers?  Far from home with friends spread across the world Facebook provided a simple way to say “hey” and post a picture or two.  It was of course main stream media and the elders who made things “unsafe” on the internet.

From focused advertisement, to identity theft, and job applications, all the warnings that are thrown out today about the dangers of having your information online have nothing to do with staying in contact with friends or sending online invites to study sessions.  Sure, kids have to be smart, adjust privacy settings (which is both possible and simple) so that the jerk giving you a hard time at school can’t stalk your pictures and post inappropriate comments, but that’s common sense (I’d hope).  The serious problem is really misunderstanding then coupled with misuse.

If social networks were just that, a digital connection for social interaction, perhaps controversy would be limited.  But, like email and the evolution of spam, problems will always surround internet communication.  All we can do now is take a step back, and maybe give kids a little slack in some areas.  Sometimes a red plastic cup in a profile picture is nothing more than a red plastic cup.

What is a “Friend”?

So, as part of the grand experimment in social networking, I’ve been on Facebook for over a week. I have 32 “friends”. Some of those people have over a hundred Facebook friends. I know for a fact that hese people aren’t nearly that popular away from their PC.

In the “real” world, friend is not a term I throw around lightly. Friendship implies trust, camaraderie, shared interests and ideals. A friend is someone you want to spend time with. Someone you can count on when you need them. Somebody you could ask when you need a ride to the airport (OK - some friends believe that the airport run goes beyond the bounds of friendship). In the real world, if you asked me how many friends I have - not acquaintances, not poker buddies - actual friends - I’m pretty sure the final count would come in well under my 32 Facebook friends -and the Facebook friend requests are still pouring in. I should hit 50 by the end of the week. Because of Facebook is the word Friend losing it’s value?

Of my gang of 32, I initiated 4 - and those were nieces and nephews with whom I actually would like to stay in closer contact. Beyond that - some folks who reached out to me included my sisters, close friends and a few business acquaintances.

Then it gets interesting - I did indeed hear from first and second cousins. A high school acquaintance I have not been in touch with since the day we graduated. A friend of my nieces. My buddy’s ex-wife. A former co-worker who had moved to Costa Rica (and I’d never noticed!). I was invited, by someone I’d met twice in Nassau, to join a Facebook group for Bahamas Local Businessmen. Huh?

And the one-line status updates continue to baffle me. People are “drinking beer”, “getting excited about the weekend”, “torturing my cat” and the very post-modern, self-referential “checking my Facebook”. Stay tuned for more breaking news - someone may water their plants…

The Great Social Experiment

Ok - I know I’ve been slacking on the blog updates. Sorry about that. But I’m back.

And to start us back up, I’m venturing into the world of “social networking“. Yes, at long last, I will have a Facebook page!

You might be wondering what the big deal is. Why wouldn’t I have had a Facebook page already? I’d actually registered a year or two back - just to see what was going on, but had never even filled in my profile. There are a few reasons that I held out this long:

The “Ick” Factor- For the longest time, I still thought of Facebook as a place for high school and college kids. When they fisrt started Facebook, you couldn’t even join unless you were a student with a “.edu” email address to prove it.  That was still my perception. And and when I heard my contemporaries talking about having a Facebook page, I still thought that a middle-aged guy with a Facebook page would make me look like a creepy schoolyard stalker.

I Have Enough Friends - I kept hearing stories about rediscovering people from you past. My 50-something sister re-connected with high school friends from over 30 years ago. People found friends who had moved or relatives they’d lost touch with. Maybe it’s just me, but I already stay in touch with the people I want to keep in my life. I have no room for re-adding old friends and do I really need to exchange photos with third cousins that I haven’t seen since my bar mitzvah?

What Do I Do When I Get There? - OK - so I put up a page, post a picture of myself and tell a bit about my life. And swarms of friends, relatives and kindred souls find me. Now what? If you weren’t invited to my Labor Day BBQ, why would you want to see pictures of it? There’s the Twitter-like “What I’m Doing Now” function, but again, if you haven’t seen me in 20 years, do you care that I just got back from the liquor store? (Of course, if you’ve known me that long, you’d know that a trip to the liquor store isn’t really breaking news…)

So, despite my reservations, I put up a page, responded to the long-ignored “friend” invites and lit the fuse. The invites have already started to pour in. So we’ll go through this together. We’ll look at who found me, try and figure out how they found me, why they reached out and maybe you can help me figure out what to do now that I’m “connected” to these people…