MySpace
Child Safety Concerns – A new website called Imbee allows Parents to
supervise their Kids
June 16th, 2006
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imbee's website |
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As a parent you
may feel compelled to lock away your children and not let them on the
internet, but if you are willing to work with your child you might be
able to use a new website called imbee (imbee.com) that allows parents
to monitor their child’s blogs and posts and their friends they come in
contact with online.
MySpace has become
an extremely popular website
for
“social-networking” online; however there
is a lot of information on this site that may be unwelcome to teens and
young children. Another downfall to MySpace and other sites is that
anyone can search a user’s profile, however on imbee it allows only
registered users to search the site.
Imbee goes even
further by granting permission to only those that are invited to view
the blog, messages, or pictures as specified by the parent. The
security options are being put into the hands of the parents and making
imbee a win-win situation for the parent and the child. This creates an
environment that allows for a child to learn about computers, website
design and the internet. It can even help them be creative while at the
same time be able to build friendships on the internet.
At the Imbee
website an adult with a credit card has to register on the website to
participate. This will help in some regards to make it so that the
parent will be aware that the child is registering for an online
socializing site. There is a cost for the full services, and you can
invite none members into the imbee chat for free.
The parent chooses
whether they will monitor or have to approve posts made in their kid’s
blog, comments made by their kid’s blog or album, and comments made by
their kid’s friends in a blog or album. Parents can decide if they want
to either monitor or approve whose their kid’s friends are by
controlling the incoming and outgoing requests. The child is able to
have a limited email account with imbee as well.
It doesn’t mean
that you should feel 100% safe, you need to make sure to still be the
parent, imbee gives you an opportunity to work with your child to create
a safer internet social networking.
Imbee has support
for blogs, and also a photo gallery. They do not allow search engines
to spider their websites and this will help keep your child’s
information a little more private. Your kid’s imbee sight will not be
listed on Google search engine.
To get more
members imbee has created a points and rewards system for getting
friends to sign up and to visit the site. When a new member signs up
the kid gets points that they can later redeem at the imbee store.
There are three
types of memberships. The basic imbee messaging service is free. You
still need to sign up and provide a credit card, but you card will not
be charged. This is only for verification of the person signing up for
the account. There is free 90 day trial that you can sign up for that
will allow for all the features including making a blog and uploading
images. After the trial is up you will be charged a monthly fee of
$3.95. If you sign up for the full account for a year you can save a
little bit of money for one membership that includes 1 parent, 2
children, and 1 additional adult it will cost $39.95 per year. If you
have the extra large family it cost $1 extra per month (or $9.95 for the
yearly fee) for every family member over the allotted amount.
Another competitor
to imbee is FAQQLY which was launched on April 16th which is
a question and answers based community. It seems geared towards teens,
however it does not mention anything about parental controls, which
truly makes imbee unique and also a leader in “social networking” at
this time.
Is it bad to even
introduce your children to “social networking”? If you don’t let your
child participate, will they do it behind your back? It is really hard
to say what is the appropriate decision as each parent and child is
different. Probably it would be best to wait and see if your child
expresses interest in online socializing. If this is the case imbee,
would be advantageous.
Nicole Wilson
Best Syndication
Social Networking Online Books
Keywords and Misspellings: child safe internet
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