Personal Technology » parents

Sharing Where You Are When You Care to Share

Nick Wingfield — Thu, 21 May 2009 01:02:03 +0000

There’s a tendency in the Twitter era for people to share copious details of their lives with online pals. One way to do that is through new mobile-phone services that let people share their physical locations using the tracking technology inside modern cellphones.

While these location-sharing services have some interesting possibilities, they also raise some disturbing implications for privacy — or maybe it just seems that way if, like me, you’re over 35 years old. Lately I’ve been testing a cellphone location-sharing service that I found simple, useful and non-creepy enough that I can imagine people thirtysomething and older using it.

Send a ‘Glympse’ to share your location

The free service is called Glympse, from a company of the same name that has designed it to share your location with friends and colleagues in small increments of time — glimpses, as the name implies, of your whereabouts. Glympse just released a test version of the service as an application for the G1, a phone offered by T-Mobile that runs Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system.

The company will release versions of Glympse for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Nokia (NOK) phones in the coming weeks. Users can download the Glympse software onto G1 phones through Android Market, the online clearinghouse for applications for Android phones.

I used Glympse on an iPhone and a G1 and, for comparison, tried out a couple of other location-sharing applications, Google Latitude and Loopt. When you start the Glympse application, it identifies where you are on a map using a combination of location technologies in cellphones, including GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots and phone towers.

Your location isn’t shared with others until you “send a Glympse” to someone. The software allowed me to send a Glympse with my location for selected chunks of time lasting anywhere from zero minutes to four hours. Picking zero minutes shared only my location at the moment of sending, while selecting four hours meant the recipients of my Glympse could track me for that period of time, wherever I went.

The sender of a Glympse can address it by entering a recipient’s email address, or a mobile-phone number for a text message. Recipients get a message with a link to a map on a Web page. A nice thing about the service is that it doesn’t require recipients to have the Glympse software, though the experience is richer when they do.

Sending a Glympse can be helpful anytime a friend, family member or colleague is expecting you. You can send a Glympse that lets a friend know you’re stuck in heavy traffic (although it’s wise to do that before you’re on the road to stay safe and, in some states, to avoid breaking the law). Parents can insist that teens send a Glympse when they go out for the evening.

Bryan Trussel, the CEO of Glympse, sent me several Glympses with short messages like “late lunch meeting” and “headed home” to explain where he was going. On the G1, I could see an icon representing Mr. Trussel moving around a map as he drove through the streets of Redmond, Wash., including his speed. I was also able to see traffic conditions, which would have been helpful if he had been running late. Glympse gave me a similar view of his location through a Web browser running on my PC. On the iPhone, the experience was more static, forcing me to reload a Web page to get a fresh view of Mr. Trussel’s whereabouts. Glympse says it will fix this so users of the iPhone can watch someone’s location in real time.

I encountered a bug with the service when I sent a couple Glympses to my own cellphone and that of a colleague — both BlackBerrys and neither of which had Glympse software. Both Glympses linked to high-level maps suggesting I was somewhere in North America, which wasn’t very helpful, even if it was technically accurate. The company couldn’t figure out what the problem was, and it eventually stopped happening for me too.

Once a Glympse expires, the service no longer tracks the sender’s location. It will show the sender’s last known location for 48 hours after the Glympse expires. Glympse may some day use your location information to target advertising to you, but the company isn’t doing that for now.

I’m far more comfortable with this form of finite location-sharing than the approach used by other services. Google Latitude lets you share your location to only a list of friends. It gives you the option of turning location sharing off or, through a “city level” option, it reveals only your general whereabouts. Loopt similarly allows you to set options to show, or hide your location from all or some online friends. A feature called Loopt Mix lists strangers you can send messages to in your general vicinity — many of whom seemed to be looking for romantic partners in my area.

Despite these controls, I easily forgot I was sharing my location with these two services. This might be fine for someone who enjoys being tracked down by friends during a night out on the town or is diligent about changing privacy settings when they want to go stealth.

I’m too lazy to manage my privacy so closely though. I don’t mind giving friends a look at my location, but only if I know the invitation isn’t open-ended.

Email nick.wingfield@wsj.com.

Unigo.com Gives Everyone a Say About College Picks

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 02:02:03 +0000

Research on choosing colleges takes many forms, including visiting campuses and studying the schools’ Web sites. But for a lot of high-school students and their parents, finding a centralized resource containing information about numerous schools still means buying one of the thick, costly printed guides to college that have been around for years. The Web versions of these books are surprisingly dry.

But there’s a new, free Web site that, while overseen by paid editors, is built on lively content submitted by current students at the colleges. The information isn’t just words and numbers, but includes numerous photos and videos for most schools. You also can create a small social network of people interested in the same schools or who share other common traits.

[ See post to watch video ]

In other words, this is a college-information resource built for the age of YouTube and Facebook.

The site, Unigo.com, costs nothing to use and supports itself with ads. Although it’s only a few months old, it already covers about 250 colleges and universities, and claims to average dozens of student-created reviews, photos and videos for each college. Its sophisticated search engine lets applicants comb all this material to find just what applies to them. For example, Unigo would let you see all content relevant to an Asian-American female applicant with conservative political views.

I’ve been testing Unigo, and I like it. In the sampling of college profiles I read, the site seems to have struck a good balance between the immediacy and candor of student submissions, and the professionalism needed to weed out wildly biased or inaccurate claims.

The site, founded by a 26-year-old who formerly created printed college guides, says it employs 19 full-time editors. This team uses information from a nationwide network of 300 representatives on campuses to create each college’s profile. Each representative rounds up contributions from others on campus, so that the site claims that over 15,000 students contributed to the profiles of the first 250 colleges.

Reviews, photos and videos can also be submitted out of the blue, and these are also eventually reviewed by the editors.

Each profile starts with a fairly long editor-written overview, liberally sprinkled with comments from students and accompanied by basic information, statistics and rankings.

But the heart of Unigo’s look at each college is student-created, in multiple forms. For instance, the site’s section on the University of Michigan includes 92 written student reviews, some running to thousands of words; 35 photos; 36 videos; and 10 student-written “documents.” The latter are often by campus journalists and cover things like athletics or critiques of nearby restaurants.

The videos are the most interesting part of Unigo, because they provide a look at current students and at the campus that isn’t often captured in standard guides. Most of the videos are fairly short, some only containing the answer to a single question like “What’s the best or worst thing about this school?” But others include opinions on issues like what kinds of students fit in best or worst on campus, or minitours of the campus or of typical dorms.

One student video I watched was a walk down the main street of the college town. Others are reflections on the school’s reputation, or on why the student chose one school over another. Another was about a student’s biggest freshman-year mistake (he took Classical Mythology, found it boring, didn’t do the work and flunked the course.)

I stumbled on a rap video submitted by a student from Clarkson University, which doesn’t yet have a review on Unigo, in which the rapper comments on the alumni, the architecture and the weather at the Potsdam, New York, school.

Unigo also contains articles on general topics, such as how to decide what size of college is best for you, and how to get the most out of a college tour.

While the editors ban personal attacks and nudity, they don’t bar negative comments. Unigo deliberately seeks out pro and con opinions. Many of the student submissions are enthusiastically positive, but plenty are negative comments on campus social life, the costs, the food, the faculty, the dorms and other topics.

The site feels surprisingly full for such a young venture, but it has some quirks and issues. Coverage is uneven. For instance, Vassar College in New York boasts 117 reviews and 42 videos, while the much larger University of Kansas has only 45 reviews and three videos. Finding the detailed search feature can be clumsy, because it’s not obvious on the home page. You can’t generate a quick comparison among colleges, and the site lacks any parent-oriented sections, although parents are free to use it.

Finally, there are just loads of colleges that aren’t yet included. The first 250 schools were “seeded,” with months of research and solicitation of student content. Unigo is confident it can get more schools, but only time will tell.

Still, Unigo is a good example of how user-generated content can do a lot to enhance an important topic, and still keep editorial standards.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

KidZui's Parent Plan Lets Children Explore in Safe Corner of Web

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:01:00 +0000

The Internet presents a real dilemma for parents with younger children. On the one hand, it’s filled with fun and wholesome sites for kids, and lots of educational material. On the other, it teems with inappropriate content and potentially dangerous means of communicating with strangers.

There are tools for dealing with the problem, most commonly, filtering software that attempts to bar sexual, violent and other objectionable material. But these can frustrate kids and parents, by either blocking too many things or not blocking enough.

Avatars help guide users

Some other approaches, such as the parental controls built right into the latest Windows (MSFT) and Macintosh (AAPL) operating systems, offer parents more control by allowing them to specify what Web sites a child can access. But that requires close and constant involvement by the parent as the child seeks access to more Web sites.

This week marks the launch of a parental-control service with a somewhat different approach. It’s called KidZui, and it aims to offer kids a safe subset of the Internet where they can roam freely without triggering parental worry. KidZui, for children ages 3 to 12, hopes to emphasize the positive, rather than the negative.

The service, from a San Diego company of the same name, claims to encompass 500,000 safe sites, photos and videos, ranging from pop culture to science, comics and games to history. You can watch the latest “American Idol” contestant, learn about dinosaurs, delve into history or visit popular kids’ sites, such as Webkinz and Club Penguin.

The sites, photos and videos included in KidZui are approved by a team of about 200 parents and teachers across the country, and are ranked by age, so that a site that might be right for an 11-year-old isn’t served up to a 4-year-old.

While a child can establish a list of friends in KidZui, and can share content with them, there is no instant-messaging or email function.

KidZui isn’t free, and it can’t be accessed via a regular Web browser. Instead, you must download a special KidZui browser, from kidzui.com, that runs on either Windows or Macintosh computers. I tested it on both platforms, and it downloaded quickly and installed smoothly.

The service nominally costs $99.95 a year, or $9.95 a month, but there is a 30-day free trial and an introductory rate of $49.95 a year, or $4.95 a month. It has no ads, other than those already present on Web sites kids visit.

A key selling point of the service is that busy parents can simply set up KidZui and trust that their kids will be safe online. To that end, the program can be optionally configured, so that a child can’t escape from it to use the computer’s standard browser, for example. A parent can set KidZui to launch when the computer starts up, in full-screen mode. In this mode, KidZui automatically disables or hides the common keystrokes, icons, commands and techniques that allow users to switch to, or to start up, other programs.

In addition, when KidZui is running in this locked-down mode, the child can be barred from quitting KidZui without a parent’s password. In my tests over the past week, I found some loopholes in this lockdown system, but the company plugged each leak I turned up. I can’t swear that a clever kid won’t be able to escape from KidZui, but the program blocks most obvious exits.

Inside the software, the company has tried to create a fun, lighthearted world. Each child is represented by a “Zui,” a cartoon-like character that can be customized with hair, clothing and other features. There are lots of sound effects, and kids can rate content with illustrated tags ranging from “best” and “cool” to “boring” or “gross.”

When a child types in a term like “ocean” KidZui offers a list of related terms as well, to guide further exploration. If a child types in a search term or a Web address that has been banned from the KidZui universe, a message appears saying “This page isn’t available on KidZui, but your parents can add it for you.” This applies not only to terms typed into KidZui’s own search bar, but also to terms a child enters at sites like Wikipedia or in the search boxes embedded in other sites. The main pages of Google and Yahoo can’t be summoned.

If a search or Web address is new to KidZui, a different message appears promising that it will be reviewed.

I did find some holes in this system. For instance, I was able to get to The Wall Street Journal’s Web site and do an internal search on “Spitzer,” which turned up a story on the former New York governor’s sex scandal.

Parents can get detailed reports about the KidZui activities of each of their children and can tweak the content they can see by adding specific types of material, such as “athletic violence,” and approving or blocking specific Web sites.

For parents who want to allow limited Web use by their young children without constantly micromanaging their online activities, KidZui may be worth a try, but don’t expect it to be perfect.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.