Rev2.org

A large number of parents in the US believe that the benefits gained by their children’s use of social media outweigh or offset any perceived risks, according to a national survey by the Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics.

Despite concerns about cyber bullying and child molesters, 83 per cent of the respondents said the use of social media is important for the success of their children as it fosters learning and encourages collaboration.

More than half of the 728 parents polled said that social media made their kids more open-minded.

However, nearly 40 per cent of the parents surveyed are worried that the use of social media could lead to behavioural problems such as social isolation. Additionally, roughly 40 per cent opined that the online activity could negatively affect the real-life social skills of their kids, such as their ability to make friends.

Ed Christophersen, Child Psychologist at Children’s Mercy Hospitals, explained that although children’s exposure to social media has lots of benefits, giving kids unsupervised and unlimited access to the internet could lead to problems.

Law enforcement officials agree. Gary Mason, Police Spokesman at Overland Park, Kansas, commented that parents have the right to demand their children’s passwords at social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter so that they can supervise and safeguard their kids from inappropriate content.

Additionally, 71 per cent of the parents surveyed stated that 13 is the right age to let their kids use social media. Fittingly, Facebook prohibits children younger than 13 from signing up. However, there are many cases where children have lied about their age in order to open an account.

Google’s latest beta edition of the Chromium browser has some features that definitely herald the next-generation in Web browsing.  Imagine a browser that intuitively can synch with your camera, microphone, or game controller, allowing apps and games direct access to these without added plugins?

That’s what Chrome 21 beta can do.  Two new application protocol interfaces (APIs) allow apps to ask for permission to use your accessories directly, no plugin needed.

Using Gamepad Javascript, for example, a game could let you play with your game controller without needing any added plugins.  Of course, games like Mafia Wars or Farmville aren’t going to see much use of this, but online shooters and the latest-generation of massive multiplayers could benefit greatly.  Especially given the trend in MMOs towards seamless play, allowing gamers to play the same game and characters on multiple devices.

The other API is called getUserMedia, which accesses WebRTC in HTML5, a real-time communications protocol.  This lets the browser (and anything running within it, such as a website or app) to access your camera and microphone to do all kinds of things.

An app could, for instance, allow seamless and real-time manipulation of photos/images/video from your Web cam to apply filters, effects, and so on.  This would take many podcast videos to new levels and make for some interesting app options in photo sharing.

That’s just the beginning.

As our demonstration graphic implies, apps could (and already are, within Chrome beta) interact with the camera to provide motion recognition ala the Kinect.  This would let you do things like play the xylophone on-screen, create macros to add graphics or effects according to gestures, etc.

Lots of possibilities with this new age of browsing!

Both Apple and Foursquare have now officially stopped using Google Maps as their mapping source for apps.  Foursquare dropped Google Maps from its Web-based offering and then Apple dropped it for its iPhoto for iOS features.  Smaller businesses and startups are foregoing Google’s mapping app in favor of others, like the open-source, crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap.

Why?  Google Maps has become the way nearly all of us interact with mapping of almost any kind online.  While our GPS systems for our cars and such are usually from one of the big three in mapping (TeleNav, Tele Atlas / TomTom, Navteq), if it’s on the Web or connected to it, it’s probably using Gooogle.

Until recently.  The reason many are shying away from Google Maps is simple: it’s no longer free to use in apps and it now pushes advertising, even through uses outside of the Google website.

This means that apps which use Google Maps must pay for the privilege.  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and the threshold to be required to do this is relatively high (25,000 map loads per day), but it’s a concern for many apps built on the premise that Maps would be free from Google.

About the time the 90-day grace period to roll in the new charges for mapping came (last week), Apple and Foursquare left the service.  Others will probably follow in the coming weeks.

Google obviously has an advantage in that their the go-to spot for mapping now and have some of the most sophisticated and thorough maps available on the Web.  Most of its real competition is also charging for access to maps and many of them do not offer the features and capabilities that Google’s API does.

So until crowd-sourced options like OpenStreetMap reach a level where they can compete with Google, it’s not likely that Google will lose huge chunks of market share.  But it will (and has been) lose some of the more high-profile users of Maps, which may affect how the public perceives Google’s service.

A new study, Trends in Digital Gaming: Free-to-Play, Social and Mobile Games from Parks Associates says that the number of gamers (game players) in the United States has gone up 241% since 2008.  The study says that 135 million people play at least one hour per month as compared to 56 million in 2008.  Smartphone gamers have increased a lot as well, going up to 17% from7%.

Most players are on free to play (F2P) games on either their PC or through Facebook.  The industry is seeing a clear shift away from packaged games to online and digital download games that are more of a service than a one-time purchase.

“Instead of ending support of customers after they buy individual game titles, game companies now focus on building gamer communities and developing ongoing relationships with their customers,” said Parks Associates research analyst and study author Pietro Macchiarella. “The positive effect of this approach is that game monetization can be extended beyond the point of sale. Unlike traditional offline games, the online world allows the industry to earn revenue even when people play the same game repeatedly.”

In the F2P model, for instance, the barrier of relatively high cost up-front purchases (games were often $50+ at release and $20 or so a few weeks later) are gone.  Instead, players download and play for free, but often end up paying here and there for upgrades, add-ons, and other micro-transactions that are totaling an average of $21/month per paying player.

Mobile gaming may soon see the same kind of m-t boost as the ease of making purchases through them proliferates.

Earlier this month, Facebook launched its Open Graph tools to allow app developers to more easily share user activity data across timelines and on their own sites for integration.  While controversial, as the usual privacy concerns were aired, the tools have been utilized in some interesting ways.  Here’s a few of them.

Fab.com’s $10 monthly credit for opt-ins. This is really cool.  Usually, your data is seen as a free-for-all by companies and Facebook itself.  Fab.com, however, is rewarding users for opting in to shar etheir shopping data with them.  For the next five months, Fab pays $10 a month in credits to users who opt into their Facebook social shopping app.  The company has also added little nuances that use the tool in other interesting ways, such as hiding purchases when they’re called “gifts” in the timeline so the person its for won’t see it in on your profile.

Ticketmaster product finding. Rather than throwing out random ads at people in hopes a percentage of them want to actually buy tickets to see the artist or event being promoted, Ticketmaster has come up with a way to watch opt-in users’ streams to offer ads related to what they’re talking about or using.  Listening to that new band on Spotify?  If they’re coming to your area, Ticketmaster will offer you tickets to the show.  Nicks fan living in Texas?  No prob, when they come to town, you can get seats on the proper side of the stadium.

There are a lot of other apps out there now, but most are doing what you’d expect them to do.  Zynga is basically self-promoting by watching the games people play or talk about and mentioning similar titles of their own.  More will be coming as Facebook speeds up the approval process.

For the first time, Facebook for Android is showing more mobile daily active users than is Facebook for iPhone.  The Android Facebook app launched in 2009, a year after the iPhone’s app, though both were internally developed by Facebook.

The Android app, according to Facebook’s numbers, is now pulling 58.3 million DAU compared to iPhone’s 57.4 million.  Facebook released the latest update to the iPhone app which added Timeline access, previously only available on Android, but with Android phones activating at a blistering 550,000 per day, it may not be enough to catch up.

TechCrunch broke the story after independent numbers from AppData.  By contrast, Facebook for BlackBerry and Windows Phone has 29.9 million and 360,000 DAU, respectively.

According to John Constine at TechCrunch: “User counts of the Facebook apps matter because they can influence where Facebook devotes mobile development resources. For years, features were first released for the iPhone version, possibly because its higher user count made it more of a priority. If the Android app becomes significantly more popular, Timeline might be the first of many features it gets early.”

He’s right.  Despite my affinity for the iOS brigade of gadgets, it’s good to see some competition to keep things fresh.  If Android can provide some competition in the market, the Apple products will be all the better for it.