About two weeks ago I had to baby sit my two younger cousins who are both still in primary school. Like most kids their age they spent their leisure time watching TV and mucking about on the internet. On the internet the boys played mindless flash animated games and then googled just about everyone they knew. It got me thinking about how I spend my leisure time on the internet, I spend it on Facebook, gmail chat and googling potential love interests and ex boyfriends.
So besides being a stalker I spend my time wanting to interact with other people on the internet. So why should my kid cousins not want to do the same? Devon who is 12 had heard about Facebook but didn’t know exactly what it was. When I showed him I could see that he was soon interested but not exactly too thrilled because there weren’t any games.
So this got me thinking to kids’ social networking and virtual community sites. Surely there has to be sites that are dedicated to it. So I googled around and found Imbee. The site is like Myspace and Facebook rolled into one but only kids between the ages of 8 and 14. It works the same as the two sites, you add friends, create an avatar, join groups, blog, message people, listen to music etc. Like Myspace kids can even add celebrities to their list of friends.
Imbee, created by Industrious Kid, has taken precautions so that kids can network in a safe environment. Unlike other social networking sites Imbee is not free, this means that parents have to take out their credit cards in order for their kids to join after a free trial period. Parents also have access to a control panel so they can monitor and restrict their kids to whatever they want or deem safe. This way parents can have a big brother eye on what their precious darlings are doing. This way Imbee is protecting the site from becoming the Pick ‘n Pay for paedophiles.
So far over 25 000 active members use the site, so clearly kids think its cool and parents think it’s safe.
To read more check out these articles:
Imbee Launches MySpace for Kids
Imbee - Disney Is Investor
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8 comments:
Imbee sounds all good and safe but I don't think people should be so easily convinced.
What's stopping a paedophile with a credit card from pretending that he is opening an account for his imaginary child? And there are always paedophilic hackers out there who will find loop holes.
Kids watch out!
I agree with Galen's comment - there is nothing stopping paedophiles from entering this circle and posing as an 8/ 10 year old boy/ girl - no way, I don't trust it!
i agree with what you saying, but at least parents can control or at least see what their kids get up to on the site, they can check who their kids are communicating with. kids become targets of paedophiles because the parents have no clue what they up to on the internet. at least this way they are involved and are able to protect their kids from lurking weirdos
Great post, Hayley. Also, check out www.Yomod.com -- a free safe social media site for tweens. Yomod offers age-appropriate videos and a secure community. Like Imbee, Yomod requires parents to submit credit card details at registration to deter undesirables from entering the secure community. But Yomod does even more: Yomod also has a team of moderators reviewing comments on the site to make sure everybody is playing nice!
Yomod co-founder,
Brian
I agree that these sites can be dangerous. Hayley, maybe have a look at the virtual games like Maple Story and Club Penguin - my 12 year old brother spends lots and lots of time on Club Penguin. These are interesting sites because kids get to meet other 'children' (or supposedly children) from all around the world and interact with them virtually. Maybe look at the appeal of these sites for children... could be interesting! Nice topic...
I never imagined that there was a mini-facebook somewhere out there.
What do kids get out of these sites anyway? I mean what prompts a parent to sign-up their kids onto these sites?
Is it just about social networking or are there some educational purposes to it?
Thanks very much for posting about imbee.com.
As one of the founders we purposely designed imbee.com to keep our young members safe. That’s why on the front end we require a credit card (no fee is charged) to authenticate the parent and then by proxy, their child. Next, we are the only social network to provide a built-in parental control panel – which means mom or dad can set age-appropriate parameters related to their child’s content development or communications activities. Parents can see every blog post before it’s published, every message before it’s sent and they have 100% approval on any friend request made to their child. Next we keep all of our members content private – that means you can’t search for a profile / personal information using Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine. We also don’t’ support search within imbee.com. We facilitate what we call “controlled scope of publishing” that means that kids only publish or share information with others on their approved circle of friends list. Finally we actively monitor all public groups within imbee.com.
As you can see with all these layers or security, it’s virtually impossible for someone with devious intentions to connect to our kids. Parents are involved. We are involved and we provide more tools and layers of security than any other social network or virtual world. I hope this post helps to clarify what we do in terms of keeping our members safe.
Tim D
Founder,
that's tim for reading and making it a bit more clear for us. I think it's a great site for kids. good luck with it!
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