Making Social Sites Safer

By Wendy Tanaka, Forbes.com

Maggie didn't always feel safe on MySpace. The 17-year-old New Rochelle, N.Y., resident used to receive lewd instant messages from a man who found her on the popular social networking site.

But after making a few changes to her profile recently, Maggie, who asked us not to publish her last name, got rid of the perpetrator and reclaimed her sense of security on the site. "I blocked the person's screen name, reported him on MySpace, changed my age to 99 and made my profile private," she says.

These small, common-sense actions can make a huge difference in safety on social networks, experts say. MySpace, Facebook and other social networks advocate taking such measures and post safety guidelines on their sites. While the majority of people on social networks are safe, a few high-profile cases of sexual predators and cyberbullying, such as the Missouri teen who committed suicide in 2006 after receiving taunting comments on her MySpace page, have prompted the industry to seek more ways to keep users out of harm's way.

At the behest of 49 states and the District of Columbia, MySpace in January agreed to implement a number of new safety policies. So far, MySpace has taken several steps, including creating an online tutorial to help parents better understand social networking and adding a software tool that allows parents to determine if their teens have a MySpace profile. In May, Facebook agreed to similar measures to make its site safer.

See: "Seven Tips For Keeping Kids Safe Online"

MySpace, the world's largest social network with more than 117 million monthly users, also created a task force to develop age and identity verification technology to protect minors from inappropriate behavior and content. In February, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School was selected to head the task force, and two dozen other companies and organizations, including Facebook, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) and the Progress and Freedom Foundation, joined the initiative.

The task force, which is working on recommending identity verification technologies that can be used in the industry, has met twice so far. The discussions have centered on whether identity technologies can make social sites safer, or whether consumer education works best. State attorneys general believe more technological solutions are necessary, but some task force members contend that identity technologies on the market aren't adequate. And even if they were better, they likely can't prevent every unwanted incident and they could block contact between friends and relatives.

"So, if he's 16 and she's 21, they shouldn't talk? Maybe they're brother and sister," says Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

Thierer also says that too many checks and restrictions could turn off users and hamper advertising on social networks. "There's only so far the sites can go before undermining their business and cutting off their customer base," he says. "At some point, it becomes an annoyance for users."

Both Facebook and MySpace, however, say safety improvements should make their sites more attractive to advertisers. "It makes users loyal and advertisers want to come to our site," says Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer at Facebook.

MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam agrees that advertisers like secure sites. "Every advertiser wants to make sure its brand isn't tarnished on a particular site," he says.

The focus on identity technologies makes the assumption that sexual predators are the biggest safety problems for social networks, but cyberbullying is far more common. According to a recent report in the journal Pediatrics, a third of children age 10 to 15 said they have been verbally harassed online, while half as many reported being sexually solicited.

Larry Magid, co-director of task force member ConnectSafely.org, an Internet safety site for families, says most children who get involved with sexual predators understand the situation. "It appears that kids who do get in trouble with predators are high-risk kids," he says. "In one way or another, they are seeking out this attention."

Magid and Thierer say there should be more consumer education to prevent cyberbullying and more common-sense practices to ensure greater safety on social sites. "There are no easy technical fixes for complex human behavioral problems," Thierer says. "We need to teach kids 'Netiquette.' "

Parry Aftab, a former Internet lawyer who now runs WiredSafety.org, another task force member, says it's too early to say how the task force will handle all these issues. "It's going to take us a little while to gather everything together," she says. "When you're dealing with social issues, everyone comes at it with his own perspective. The most important thing to come out of this is a reality check: this is important, this isn't. Do a lay of the land and here's where we go."

The Biggest Lie On Myspace - Tom Is Nothing But A Scam!

By A. Sharma

Everybody assumes that MySpace is just a place to meet people that perhaps would have never met otherwise. Alongside, lays the assumption that this website was created by Tom Anderson, a friendly teenager who wanted to share his life with his friends and other pals with his same interests. But this isn’t accurate at all. Tom didn’t create MySpace neither the objective was this naive fairytale.

The awful truth
What MySpace really is, is a focused marketing site in the innocent costume of a social network.
Its purpose is actually developing email databases for further advertising and promotion that we all receive (and hate) in our inboxes. In other words: Spam 2.0.

Last year, Hitwise stated that MySpace had “surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users”, which means that millions of people had signed up for the site, from elementary schools kids to huge enterprise owners. But it also means multi-millionaire profits for a hidden group of corporation behind this phenomenon.

The executives behind this fairy tale
Despite the lie we’ve all heard about the origin of MySpace, there are other many people and companies involved in its creation. Tom Anderson is nothing but a distraction. The executives implicated also have an important history of mass marketing and bonds to investment scandals.

Three persons are specifically essential to MySpace creation: Chris DeWolfe, Brad Greenspan and Tom Anderson himself. DeWolfe was VP of Sales and Marketing at Xdrive Technologies, Inc. a company that blossomed during the dot-com bubble and faded away with the burst of it.

He was laid off along with Anderson, and together they founded new email marketing firm called ResponseBase.

On September 9 2002, eUniverse (whose chairman was Greenspan) purchased ResponseBase.

And that’s how they met.
Another finance partnership was drawn into this acquisition: TTMM, LP, formed by Andrew and Tiffany Wiederhorn. Andrew knew DeWolfe from high school and had been business associate in late 90s. By the end of 2002, DeWolfe became part of his friend’s new enterprise, Fog Cutter Capital Group; and also by that time, Andrew Wiederhorn was being investigated due to felony charges. Two years later, he had to serve 13 months of prison but, surprisingly, the company kept paying him his annual salary of $350.000.

A little bit of MySpace history
Somehow, DeWolfe received an invitation to join Friendster. He re-sent it to Greenspan, Anderson and other eUniverse employees. Once they recognized the potential of such a social network, they created their own version of it within 10 days, and baptized it as MySpace.

After a short discussion, they decided not to sell the accounts but to keep them free, stating that profits would come through advertising (Greenspan’s idea). Despite so, Greenspan was obliged to leave the company, and with the amazing growth of popularity of the site, DeWolfe came up with the thought of creating a false PR story, having Tom as a leading character. He believed this tale would be more adequate for the kind of people joining in. Finally, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace, and a few months afterwards DeWolfe abandoned Fog Cutter Capital Group.

Leaving mischief and frauds aside, MySpace revolutioned social interaction, where everybody can promote themselves the way they want, by only paying the price of watching unsolicited advertisements. Only fate will say where that will lead.

-----------------Ankur Sharma is an expert Myspace marketer who has helped lots of newbies as well big businesses earn credibility on Myspace.

You can contact him at myspaceoutsourcing@yahoo.com Send in your suggestions or queries, and don't forget to get the first chapter of his famous book "How to build a Myspace empire step by step" and a free membership of the Secret Myspace Marketing Society for FREE.

Just shoot him an email.