MySpace to offer parental notification software

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 11:44:00 -0500

The Wall Street Journal reports that MySpace is planning to offer free parental notification software

Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn’t enable parents to read their child’s e-mail or see the child’s profile page and children would be alerted that their information was being shared. The program would continue to send updates about changes in the child’s name, age and location, even when the child logs on from other computers

Here is the way the software, code named Zephyr, works.

A parent can download the free software onto his or her home computers. The software will identify any user who logs onto MySpace from those computers and collect his or her user name, age, and hometown. That information will be stored on the hard drive and parents (actually, whoever has the administrative privileges on that computer) can access it using a password. That information is also publicly available to anyone who visits MySpace’s Web site, but many parents have trouble locating their kids’ profile pages because kids often don’t use their real names.

Of course, this might be too little too late and may have the effect of turning off many of it’s younger users, who are moving to social networking sites like FaceBook and Xanga.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes down. To read the entire article, click here.

The Famundo Blog: MySpace to offer parental notification software

MySpace to offer parental notification software