In a ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks said MySpace is protected under the Communications Decency Act and cannot be expected to verify the age of every user because that "would of course stop MySpace's business in its tracks."
Having trouble making friends on MySpace? Another social-networking Web site is looking to set you up with some friends you might like. Mindkin was designed by students at Carnegie Mellon University as an online matchmaker, to help users find friends they may be compatible with. The university's student newspaper, The Tartan, says people are getting fed up with Facebook, MySpace, and other sites on which users must choose their own connections, often ending up with online "friends" whom they hardly even know.
There's a not-so-highlighted number in the Pew report that i find very interesting though. 84% of teens have posted messages to a friend's profile or page. This practice may signal something very interesting. Teens are primarily writing "private" messages to each other through this feature. By speaking in the witness of others, it's a lot harder to spread hearsay (or fabricated IM messages).
espinthebottle.com is a flirting site for teenagers that vets its participants’ information before matching kids up, to keep the fun clean and safe. So far, the site has attracted more than 3.8 million “hotties” (its term).
Habbo is an online community for teens that incorporates gaming, social networking, and content creation. Teens come from over 20 countries and the site receives approx. 7 million unique users per month.
A youth contributor writes about MySpace's new tracking system, Zephr, that allows parents to monitor the information that their children are entering onto their profiles: "The desperation [teens] have nowadays to express how we truly feel is being overshadowed by the paranoia of the older generation wanting to wrap us in cotton wool."
The study found that, while older girls use such sites the most, older boys are more likely to meet new people through them. Sixty percent of older boys, for example, say they use the sites to make new friends, while only 46 percent of older girls do. And older boys are more than twice as likely to say they use the sites to flirt.
“Older boys are much more expansive in their use of the sites,” said Amanda Lenhart, one of the study’s two authors. “I believe that it has a lot to do with socialization. A lot of the media messages about safety tend to be aimed more at girls than boys.”
A recently redesigned Web site for the Saatchi Gallery in London — a kind of MySpace knockoff for artists — is causing something of a sensation. In May Mr. Saatchi, famed for spotting young unknowns and turning them into art-world superstars, created a section on his Web site, called Your Gallery, for artists of all ages to post their work at no charge.
Virtual communities are as important as their real-world counterparts, many members of online communities believe. A survey found 43% of online networkers from the US felt "as strongly" about their web community as they did about their real-world friends.
MySpace lacks that anchor. Having a site devoted to social networking is like having a site devoted to fun. It feels shallow, and as the novelty of online social networking wears off, MySpace users might migrate to the niche social sites.
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In a ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks said MySpace is protected under the Communications Decency Act and cannot be expected to verify the age of every user because that "would of course stop MySpace's business in its tracks."
There's a not-so-highlighted number in the Pew report that i find very interesting though. 84% of teens have posted messages to a friend's profile or page. This practice may signal something very interesting. Teens are primarily writing "private" messages to each other through this feature. By speaking in the witness of others, it's a lot harder to spread hearsay (or fabricated IM messages).
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