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All 50 states adopt MySpace safety features for young users
[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 01.25.08 under MySpace News
Since a recent agreement between all 50 state attorneys general and MySpace, tweens and Internet geeks can rest assured friends in their Top Eight are not pedophiles or stalkers.
Under the agreement, made Jan. 14, MySpace, owned by News Corp., promised to better protect its under-18 users through the creation of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force and the introduction of “age locking”– a process allowing users under the age of 18 to block users over 18 from contacting them and prohibiting adult users to browse for users under 16 years old.
MySpace, with the help of a third party company, will also create a registry of email addresses for children under 18. Parents who want to prohibit their children from joining MySpace can submit their children’s email addresses to the list.
“We hope in the future to have similar agreements with other social networking sites,” said Amie Breton, spokeswoman for Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. She said Coakley started with MySpace because the site is “the most popular.”
Jay Senter, spokesman for Common Sense Media, a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that advocates for family-friendly media, said he applauds MySpace for taking “important steps,” because it provides peace of mind for parents and children using the state, he said.
“[Other sites’ efforts] seem to be efficient and successful,” he said. “So there is technology out there that is effective.”
Though Senter said online predators using social networking sites may not be a widespread threat, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children statistics suggest the problem is rampant.
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children deputy director John Shehan said the recent legislation is worthwhile because one in seven children has received an unwanted sexual solicitation over the Internet.
“To hear that MySpace is taking additional steps is fantastic,” he said. “Seeing that attorney generals were able to make a collaborative effort is a major step.”
The NCMEC’s cyber tip-line, created in 1998 to act as an emergency number for reports of Internet predators, received 2,000 reports last week, he said. More than 180 reports regarded online enticement of children for sexual acts, Shehan said.
He said although the new technologies will be helpful, there is no one way to make social networking sites safer for children because of the number of online sexual predators.
“There is no silver bullet,” said Shehan. “It really takes a multi-pronged approach. You need parent involvement, education and law-makers working in cohesion.”
Despite the recent legislation, children using the social sites will still be able to get around their parents’ protective measures, said Boston University College of Communication freshman Jackie Reiss.
“If a kid wants a MySpace page, they’ll figure out plenty of ways to circumvent new security measures,” she said. “If parents give one email address to MySpace to block, the kid can just go and create another e-mail account in five minutes.”
Facebook Working On a Music Platform For Bands; Not iTunes Killer, But MySpace; Apple Tieup
[ No Comments ] Posted on 10.06.07 under MySpace News
Facebook is working on an artist platform to be launched later this year, which in essence is supposed to be better than what MySpace allows with its platform, according to multiple sources I have spoken to since this morning after a slightly off-the-mark rumor came out earlier. The platform will allows bands and labels to create artists pages, and allow various widgets to be embedded for music promotion, organizing events, etc. Among those widgets would be iLike, the most popular app inside Facebook, but will also include iTunes widgets for sampling (to being with), and eventually buying music through Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - News). The service will still have the utilitarian sensibilities of the Facebook platform, the sources stress, rather than the more chaotic and flashy platform that MySpace has.
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What Facebook Could Learn from MySpace
[ No Comments ] Posted on 10.06.07 under MySpace News
Advocates are urging Facebook to make its social networking site safer by taking a page from MySpace’s security measures.
For the record, Richard Wistocki is not a 14-year-old girl. He’s a 41-year-old detective with the Naperville (Ill.) Police Department’s Computer Crimes Unit, but he poses as a female teen, using the name “Sierra,” on social networking site Facebook. What he’s found there, Wistocki says, suggests Facebook isn’t doing all it can to ensure it protects minors from harm.
Case in point: On Facebook, “Sierra” is able to make friends with users of any age and receives invitations to join such groups as “I’m Sexually Inappropriate with My Friends,” Wistocki says. The virtual teen is able to participate in the group’s online activities, such as message sharing, and pore over images—some of them pornographic—posted by its members.
Growing Pains
Wistocki’s underage alter-ego on competing network MySpace, by contrast, cannot search adults’ profiles, and any efforts to communicate with adult members are blocked. “Facebook does not have the monitoring that MySpace has,” says Wistocki, who’s also a member of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force run by the Justice Dept. “It’s not controlled or as law-enforcement friendly.”
Wistocki is one of a growing number of advocates who urge Facebook to make its site safer for kids, arguing that when it comes to safety, Facebook would do well to take a page from News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace. On Sept. 24, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo informed Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg of an ongoing investigation of the site’s safety and security measures. Among the findings: Investigators posing as underage users had been solicited by strangers and had access to pornographic content.
The heightened safety risk, experts say, is tied to the surge in growth since September, 2006, when Facebook flung open its doors (BusinessWeek.com, 9/12/06) to all users, morphing from a site tailored mostly to college kids and high school students, and more recently, when the company gave outside developers more leeway in creating tools available to Facebook users. Facebook has 34 million unique visitors, 5 million of them under 18, according to comScore Media Metrix (SCOR). Cuomo’s office, in a statement, outlined concerns that “in Facebook’s efforts to grow, the company may be giving a lower priority to the safety and welfare of its users, and in particular, underage users.”
Wiggle Room
Hand-wringing over kids’ online safety is nothing new for MySpace, itself the target of allegations of predatory behavior by adults toward minors. The difference, child advocates say, is that MySpace has aggressively begun tightening protections. Under Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace has developed various safety teams (BusinessWeek.com, 1/24/07) with responsibilities including image review and handling complaints filed by users about inappropriate content or behavior. “In the past year, MySpace has become more proactive in seeking solutions to protect its users, whereas Facebook, which started as a safer environment, seems to have loosened some of their policies and practices,” says Donna Rice Hughes, president and chairman of Enough Is Enough, a nonprofit organization that focuses on online safety. “They’ve gone in the opposite direction.”
Hughes points out that MySpace does not allow profiles of 14- and 15-year-olds to be searched on the site, a practice that started last year. Facebook allows all members’ profiles to be searched, both on the site and on Google (GOOG), except when the users opt out.
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MySpace has developed a team that previews all uploaded material to verify that it is not pornographic, whereas Facebook does not practice image review, according to Hughes.
A Facebook spokesperson declined to detail the company’s safety practices, but said in a statement, “As our service continues to grow, so does our responsibility to our users to empower them with the tools necessary to communicate efficiently and safely.” On its site, Facebook recommends that children ages 13 to 18 “ask their parents for permission before sending any information about themselves to anyone over the Internet.” Users also can restrict access to their Facebook profiles by non-”friends.” Other protections include a stipulation that only current high school students can join high school networks. Facebook also has a chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, though it doesn’t disclose Kelly’s responsibilities.
Gatekeepers Needed
Such measures are not stringent enough, says Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who has alleged the site allows sex offenders to register profiles. “Facebook has a long way to go before we are satisfied,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “We will continue to consider all options, including possible legal action, to assure that Facebook and other social networking Web sites better protect children from sexual predators and adult material.”
For its part, MySpace works with Enough Is Enough to produce educational literature and forums in online safety to parents and kids. MySpace also works with law enforcement to crack down on cyberpredators. In December, 2006, MySpace contracted Sentinel Tech Holding, a provider of online identity verification, to create a database of e-mails and physical descriptions of more than 500,000 registered sex offenders. The database is used to screen profiles on social networks, and matches are taken down. MySpace reportedly removed 29,000 profiles as a result of the technology. Facebook, which does not currently use the database, “grew incredibly rapidly, and they weren’t ready for the security problems that were going to hit them,” says Sentinel Tech CEO John Cardillo. “It’s a growing pain. It’s something that happens when you become successful.”
To cope with those pains, Facebook needs to overhaul its security, starting by appointing someone to lead the way to a safer site, Hughes says. The company ought to have its own staff devoted to taking down inappropriate content and providing a better response when children or parents report improper behavior.
Until then, safety on Facebook begins with users like Alana Morales, a 14-year-old high school student who says she spends about an hour on the site each day. She takes steps to protect herself by only accepting requests from people she knows from school. “Just being on the computer, you’re not safe,” she says. “Someone can IM you, and you don’t know if they are who they say they are.”
Added Cd and DVD Cover Generators to FreeDiskSpace.com
[ No Comments ] Posted on 10.06.07 under FreeDiskSpace Features
Added a CD Cover Generator. Generate covers of your favorite CD and paste them to your MySpace Pages. A great way for you to show off your music tastes.
Added a DVD Cover Generator. Generate covers of your favorite DVD and paste them to your MySpace Pages. A great way for you to show off your movie tastes.
MySpace, PayPal let candidates fund-raise online
[ No Comments ] Posted on 10.06.07 under MySpace News
NEW YORK – MySpace will let U.S. politicians and non-profit groups raise money for their campaigns through its popular social networking site in a service developed with online payments company PayPal.The tool creates a space for soliciting donations on the MySpace pages of U.S. presidential candidates and non-profit groups, allowing a user to make the contribution from their own PayPal account, or create one quickly. It will be available on MySpace’s Impact Channel highlighting social and political issues at impact.myspace.com.
The PayPal fund-raising tool allows users to add the feature to their personal MySpace pages and to encourage their friends to support the same causes.In addition to top contenders for the 2008 White House race, non-profit groups that will use the service include RAINN, the largest U.S. organization fighting sexual assault, and FINCA International, which provides financial services to some of the world’s poorest families.
“It’s one thing for a campaign to go out and reach people directly and raise money, but people respond to issues and causes and pleas far more readily when it comes from people they personally know,†Jeff Berman, MySpace senior vice president of public affairs, told Reuters.
A test version of the Impact Channel was launched in March and since then all of the major presidential candidates have set up dedicated pages on the site.
The Web came into its own as an outlet for communicating political messages in the past few election campaigns. Ahead of the 2008 race, social networks have become the newest tool to reach out to voters.
MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, offers candidates and charities an audience of nearly 110 million monthly users worldwide, many of them teens and young adults.
“When the biggest presidential candidates on MySpace have larger groups of friends than some of the biggest (music) bands in the world, you know you have reached a landmark,†Berman said.
Democratic hopeful Barack Obama is the leading candidate when it comes to the number of friends on MySpace at more than 180,000, with party rival Hillary Clinton not far behind.
EBay’s PayPal tool allows MySpace users to see how much each of their friends on the social network have donated to the same cause, and lets charities specify their fund-raising goals.
“We’re creating this giant social network money tree,†Dana Stalder, PayPal senior vice president of marketing and product, told Reuters. “You’ll see us do a lot more things around this over the course of the next year.â€
Stalder said PayPal was also making the tools available to charities for their own sites.
MySpace goes for fashion
[ No Comments ] Posted on 09.05.07 under MySpace News
NEW YORK: Will postings from across the cyberuniverse give a new meaning to the “international” collections that open Tuesday in New York?
While the shows follow fashion’s familiar course on to Europe - to London, Milan and Paris - the challenge now comes not from new fashion weeks staged in multiple cities across the world, but from the democratization of style.
Last week MySpace.com/fashion was upgraded as a dedicated part of the site and some 362,000 “members” are already posting and blogging. But the jury is out as to whether new talent will sprout on the laptop screen - or whether the space will be invaded by smart fashion houses who see it as a marketing tool.
So far, the site is filled with terse and often profane comments that are blog lingua franca, a focus on what famous celebrities are wearing (yawn!) and promotional videos, many connected to the music business.
And judging by Paris Hilton’s own Webcam video of the Los Angeles launch of her line for Kitson, fashion-savvy celebs may find it as challenging to film their designs as to create them.
Yet indie designers, especially from countries off the fashion map, do have an opportunity to bring their collections to a vast public. And even in the fashion capitals, fashion editors may find online a parallel universe of unofficial offerings.
Why not get a group of friends together to model a collection and then post it on MySpace, hoping to attract the attention of buyers and turn it into a buck? Or, now that fashion is part of the entertainment business, expect to see Fox, which owns MySpace, create its own blogosphere fashion channel.
Young shun MySpace for Bebo and Facebook
[ No Comments ] Posted on 08.28.07 under MySpace News
Bebo has overtaken MySpace as the UK’s leading social networking site as young people increasingly shun the News Corporation-owned site.
It had 10.7m unique users in July, compared with 10.1m at MySpace and 7.6m at Facebook, figures from internet tracker Comscore show.
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Bebo has been running almost neck and neck with MySpace for the past year, but July was the first month it inched ahead in the ratings, which are closely followed by advertisers keen to target a young audience.
John Delaney, analyst at technology consultancy Ovum, said: “What we saw, particularly after News Corp took MySpace over, was that the average age of MySpace users went up. It seems to be losing its youth appeal.” Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace for $580m (£290m) in 2005.
“You have the feedback areas on these sites and you see a lot of comments saying, ‘We like you guys because you haven’t sold out like MySpace’,” Mr Delaney said.
“You are getting a lot of younger people who are shunning MySpace because it is seen to be part of the establishment.”
Bebo’s owners have often said they would prefer to go public via a flotation, rather than sell the site to another company.
Facebook is fast catching up with the two leaders. July data showed it entering the top 20 most popular sites in the UK, while back in January it did not even make it into the top 100 visited sites.
The site, which was previously limited to US college students, has been growing by 375pc since the beginning of the year, compared with 63pc at Bebo and 25pc at MySpace.
Mr Delaney said: “It’s a very volatile sector. It’s becoming harder now than it was to enter as a new player because the advertisers are making deals with the leaders, but it’s certainly not a closed market.”
Find graphics, layouts and more to support your Bebo and Facebook pages at http://www.FreeDiskSpace.com.
Bebo 10.7m
MySpace 10.1m
Blogger 7.7m
Facebook 7.6m
New MySpace Martini Layout
[ No Comments ] Posted on 08.28.07 under FreeDiskSpace Features
http://www.freediskspace.com/myspace-layouts.php?layoutID=87
MySpace Train - Whore Train
[ No Comments ] Posted on 08.28.07 under FreeDiskSpace Features
Myspace friend trains are not new - people have been using them as their secret weapon to get more Myspace friends.
Our Train is the Ultimate Myspace Friends Train because of the huge volume of traffic we receive on our site. You will be seen by thousands of visitors every day.
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Hello world!
[ No Comments ] Posted on 08.28.07 under MySpace News
Welcome to our MySpace Blog at FreeDiskSpace.com. This is our first post.ÂÂ
