MySpaceSafetyTips.com

"MySpace Safety: 51 Tips" was noticed and commented on at the PluggedInHomeSchool blog. Having homeschooled our son and daughter through most of their pre-college education, we can really appreciate the situation of homeschooling families.

Providing children with positive socialization can be one of the greatest problems for homeschooling parents, especially if you live in a more remote area. Also, one of the reasons you may be homeschooling is because you wanted your children to have a different set of experiences from what is "normal" in modern society.

The article at PluggedInHomeSchool.com, "New Book About MySpace Safety", states:

"It makes sense that keeping the communication lines open with our kids is one of the most important factors. I hope as homeschoolers we have an advantage here, but it takes effort and diligence, too. Just because we’re all together in the same house doesn’t mean we’re all on the same page emotionally. Let’s build relationships with those kids while we’re building their minds."

Clearly, this is quite applicable to non-homeschooling parents as well.

I noticed a new page on the MySpace site, http://www1.myspace.com/misc/RemovingChildProfiles.html. The page is titled "Instructions for Deleting a MySpace Account." You can get to this page from links on the Safety Tips for Parents page.

The new RemovingChildProfiles.html page summarizes the standard deletion process, and the secondary method where you clear out the information in the account and enter "Remove Profile" into the "About Me" section of the profile (see Cancelling Your MySpace Account for a detailed description of these procedures).

The page also provides a new email address for parents or anyone who wants to delete a MySpace account, but is having problems doing so: deleteaccount@myspace.com .

MySpace.com announced new protections for its younger members, whereby adult users (18 and older) will have to know the young member's real name (as they entered it into their MySpace account) or the email address they use for logging in, in order to send a friend request to the young member.

This does not represent a huge change in the MySpace system. There is currently an option in the "Privacy Settings" page of the "Account Settings" that lets any user add this protection to their account. Our recommendation has been to "check this if your goal is to use MySpace only for with your real-life friends."

So, what MySpace.com has announced is that this option will automatically apply for young users when an adult (18 or older) wants to send a friend request.

As many observors have pointed out (and as we point out in the book), there is no age verification on MySpace, so any user can claim to be any age they'd like to "be." Users can even temporarily change their age, in order to change their privileges and limitations, at any time after they've signed up for an account.

So, it's clear these new automated changes won't do much of anything to deter a determined malicious adult.

We continue to recommend selecting the "Require email or last name to add me as a friend" option if you'd like greater security on MySpace. Then, no matter what age a person claims to be, they cannot send you a friend request without knowing the "real name" you entered into MySpace or the email address you use for logging into MySpace. And, we recommend you enter an altered "real name" and get an online web-based email account to use as your MySpace login. If you follow all of these steps, no one will be able to send you a friend request except people you really know in the non-virtual world.

NetFamilyNews reports a MySpace announcement that starting next week, all users will have the option to make their profile private! This is an excellent change we've advocated ever since we began studying MySpace.com.

As of 6 months ago, members who were 14-17 years old had an option to make their profile private, but to do this they had to know how to navigate the MySpace account settings. As a result, almost no teens had private profiles.

In early May, MySpace made a surprising change, whereby 14 and 15 year olds were given private profiles by default (to make their profile public they had to navigate the account settings menus) -- but they took away the option for 16 and 17 year olds to have private profiles! Starting at age 16, you had the same visibility as an adult. This made no sense whatsoever.

The new change, where all MySpace users will be able to set their profile to private, is very welcome.

For more information, see the Washington Post article "MySpace bolsters defenses, faces sex predator suit".

The book MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents has been reviewed by Top 500 Amazon.com reviewer Beth Cholette. Beth begins her review with:

In this book, authors Kevin and Dale Farnham--whose daughter was one of the original members of myspace.com--have created a comprehensive guide to the entire MySpace web domain. In addition to offering specific safety tips, the authors guide the reader step-by-step through each facet of myspace.com. For parents, this is an excellent overview of the site, and the book will likely increase their awareness of MySpace's various functions, settings, and possible risks for their children.

She doubts that many teens will be interested in what we have to say, but agrees with

... the basic tenet that the best way to keep kids safe is for parents to be well-informed. Therefore, I do recommend this book for parents of teens who are already or who plan to become MySpace users, as it is an excellent means for parents to thoroughly acquaint themselves with this particular online phenomenom.

We did title the book "for Teens and Parents," but clearly it is the parents who must teach their teens about safety issues. And parents cannot possibly do that unless they are very knowledgeable about the site their teens are using. That's how our book ended up being 184 pages long. We wanted to cover every aspect of MySpace.

The book really is the only available, comprehensive guide to MySpace. If you want to know about what the MySpace.com site offers, please consider our book. We worked very hard on making it comprehensive! Chapters are available to be read at the publisher site.

I found out the Google.com specifically states that you shouldn't have identical pages on two different domains. I was posting the excerpts from "MySpace Safety: 51 Tips" here as well as at the publishing site HowToPrimers.com.

I don't see any value in making Google not want to index our pages and guide people to the sites. Since HowToPrimers.com is where the book is actually sold, I'm going to leave the book excerpt pages at HowToPrimers.com and remove them from MySpaceSafetyTips.com.

The active MySpace Safety blog will continue at this site. There will be a link on the sidebar that will let you go read the book excerpts at HowToPrimers.com.

CBSNews.com has an interesting special report titled GenTech: The Wiring Of Teen America today. It has a lot of interesting articles about teens, tweens, and technology. Well worth visiting.

In one sense, MySpace is a massive online role-playing game, probably the world’s biggest. Each member makes a page that represents how the person wants to appear to their friends and (if their profile isn’t set to “private”) to the rest of the world.

But does the “profile” displayed on a MySpace page really tell you anything about the person who created the page? In many cases, it does. In other cases, the page is a selective representation of the person who created it. In still other cases, the MySpace page portrays something entirely different from what the person who posted it is really like.

How can you tell which is which? If your only contact with the person is on MySpace.com, then it’s almost impossible to know to what extent the posted profile represents the real person. That is the problem with treating online contacts with the same trust you would treat someone you see and talk to in the physical “real” world.

In the real world, when you communicate, your contact has an important physical component: you can see facial expressions and hear vocal intonations, and there are other clues as well that inform you about the meaning and degree of truth behind the words the person says. In the virtual, online world, these clues do not exist. All you can see is the image the author of the page or site has chosen to display to your eyes.

In the play “As You Like It” Shakespeare’s character Jacques states:

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.

Could anything be truer of the virtual world we encounter when we go online?

[Excerpted from the book MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents. If you'd like to read more of the book, please visit the publisher's site, HowToPrimers.com.]

We first heard of MySpace.com in September, 2004, when our 16 year old daughter discovered it. It was one of several sites she had found that provided an online venue for new songwriters and performers. We made some recordings of her original songs and uploaded them onto the site.

Our daughter continued to manage her account, making contacts with musicians and fans, and we didn’t pay much attention to MySpace.com for the next year or so. Then we started seeing occasional news articles about the MySpace phenomenon. MySpace had become the leading site for “social networking” and was growing rapidly in popularity among teens. It was the latest teen craze, an online addition to the instant messaging that was already a part of daily life for most U.S. teens.

We began a more extensive exploration of MySpace. Our first session of friend-hopping to the pages created by our daughter’s MySpace friends, many of whom we knew personally, was very surprising. After further investigation, we began to see MySpace as something that could also be very positive. It provided a way for people from anywhere in the world who share common interests to meet and share information.

Still, it was clear that many teens were using MySpace in a reckless manner. It was also clear that the emerging anti-MySpace attitude which advocates its prohibition is not the answer to the problem.

In this book, we hope we have offered a common sense approach to MySpace.com for both teens and parents.

Dale and Kevin Farnham
May 14, 2006

[Excerpted from the book MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents. If you'd like to read more of the book, please visit the publisher's site, HowToPrimers.com. If you'd like to support the authors' efforts in creating and providing these materials, please consider purchasing the print edition ($14.95) or the digital edition ($7.95) of the book at Amazon.com. The book is also available at Barnes&Noble and in the UK at Amazon.co.uk. We thank you for your support.]

Our book "MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents" is now available at Amazon.com! It should be possible to actually order the book at Amazon.com very soon.