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I've been writing about parenting and technology long enough for themes to begin to emerge. Like Lou Dobbs talking again and again about the "War on the Middle Class," I am going to keep following the evolving story about kids and online safety, and supporting the idea that "Safe Product Design is Good Product Design."

Monday's announcement that MySpace has unveiled a new safety plan, working in cooperation with 49 attorneys general, is a step in the right direction. However, it did draw the predictable criticism epitomized by this reader comment on The Social blog:

A Novel Idea...: reader comment from jltnol Posted on: January 14, 2008, 2:24 PM PST Story: MySpace agrees to social-networking safety plan

Why can't parents just do what the [sic] are supposed to do? Part of parenting is knowing what your kids are up to all the time.

If you can't do it then hire a baby sitter who can.

You need a license to drive and a license to fish, but anybody can have a child.

Go Figure.

Wonderful! Another chance to hone my argument against such an unrealistic point of view. This is like saying, "You had a kid, so it's your job to drive safely. Why should car makers have to provide seat belts and antilock brakes? If you don't like it, don't drive at all."

Parents can't know exactly what their kids are up to at all times, especially when the category "kids" includes teenagers. In fact, I bet that if I told you that I maintained absolute surveillance on a 15-year-old at all times, you'd think I was a paranoid, hyperinvolved parent.… Read more

This is sort of handy: OutSync is an app that will compare your Outlook and your Facebook address books, and then take the photos of people you know in Facebook who are also in Outlook, and copy them into your Outlook contacts.

It gets really cool if you use a Windows Mobile phone to connect to your Exchange server, because once it syncs the address book, the photos will then show up when people call you.

I'm not completely sure this app honors Facebook's terms of service, but it seems pretty innocuous. And it only applies to people … Read more

UPDATED: January 14, 2008 5:30pm The book isn't actually available until May! Web 3.0 and 4.0 should be in flight by then.

My pal Sarah Lacy's book about Web 2.0 "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" is now on sale on Amazon.com. I have been giving her grief about the stupidity of Web 2.0 since she has been writing this magic tome, but I have to offer my sincere congratulations to her for cranking this sucker … Read more

That noise you just heard was the sound of several hundred thousand procrastination-happy Facebook users gasping in panic.

Josh Quittner at Fortune reports that Hasbro, manufacturer of the timeless board game Scrabble, is trying to shut down Scrabulous, an unauthorized electronic version of Scrabble that has gained a rabid following on Facebook. The reasons are obvious: licensing. Scrabulous profits from advertising revenue. Hasbro, citing infringement, wants to see it scrapped.

There's no online version of Scrabble, but as Quittner notes, electronic rights to the game belong to video game manufacturer Electronic Arts. One of Scrabulous' creators confirmed to Quittner … Read more

It might still be January, but Facebook has decided to introduce a sort of virtual spring cleaning.

The social-networking site, which famously opened its gates to developer applications last May, announced late on Thursday that it will soon be instituting a way for app-happy Facebookers to keep up appearances by relegating many of their widgets to an "extended profile." By clicking the button, you will be able to hide everything except Facebook's own applications and a number of others, and a "Show Extended Profile" button will reveal the entire thing to you or your friends.… Read more

Update 8 a.m. PST January 14: Sorry, I ran out of invitations, but you can request them from Photophlow's home page. Update 8 a.m. PST January 11: I added links to a couple of helpful videos.

For a Web 2.0 powerhouse, Flickr feels awfully Web 1.0. At least that was my conclusion after spending a few hours in the chat rooms of Photophlow, a start-up that grafts a highly interactive experience on top of Yahoo's photo-sharing Web site.

Flickr deserves credit for pioneering what can be done with photos on the Internet beyond merely displaying photos and albums. Flickr advantages include tags that let members sort and search photos, groups for finding like-minded photographers and sharing photos, and maps to sift through pictures geographically.

But Photophlow, which presents a chat room interface to the act of browsing Flickr, makes all those interfaces seem static. For me, the site felt like wandering through a museum with a group of new acquaintances, commenting on pictures as we went from room to room. And some of the rooms featured our own pictures.

The site is invitation-only right now so that Oortle, the start-up behind Photophlow, can keep up with growth. I ran out of invitations, but you also can request one at the site, which is how I got in.

I'm not the only person who's favorably impressed.

'A comfy coffee lounge'"It really changes the way I use Flickr," said Alex Almeida, who publishes the Phat Photographer blog, who described Photophlow with a different metaphor. With its instant interaction, "it really is like a comfy coffee lounge with a big shoe box of photos where people can chat comfortably and pull any of those photos out of the shoebox and discuss them."

… Read more

Inside Facebook is reporting today that Facebook is set to launch three new features in Q1 of 2008. These features include:

- Friend list privacy controls

- Facebook in new languages

- Blasting messages to groups with more than 1,000 members

Friend list privacy control is a no-brainer. If you separate your friends into work and personal lists, you want to be able to control what each group sees. It's just a logical step for Facebook and a feature that probably should have been implemented before the launch of Friends lists.

Again, translating Facebook into new languages makes … Read more

On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites--social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like--and boldly deemed them to be overall "slow and inaccessible."

WatchMouse used its "Site Performance Index" (SPI) methodology to track the reliability and load time of the sites in question; this figure is computed by calculating the time needed to call up a site's home page and applying a penalty for each failed request. Lower is better: an SPI of 500 is considered good, whereas the Utrecht, Netherlands-based WatchMouse … Read more

Google and Facebook are joining ranks on DataPortability Workgroup. As the ReadWriteWeb put it, "Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges." While the process of opening up data may well take a long time, it's instructive that the web is doing what the offline software industry has thought tantamount to corporate suicide: Opening up.

Data has been the web's lock-in point, as Tim O'Reilly, in particular, has championed. Some believe this is the only way to make a buck: Remove customer options such that they're forced to continue doing business with a … Read more