Today's Youth Advisory Post is from Liz Funk who has discovered a connection between Facebook invitations and the high number of no-shows at Gen Y parties. To contact our Youth Advisory Board directly, just email them at youthadvisoryboard at ypulse.com.

Why Won’t Gen Y-ers Go To Their Friends’ Parties?

I’ve been to more than a few parties in the past few years where the host planned for twice the number of people who actually attended. It’s a sad sight: the relatively empty living room and the host whose left asking herself, "Where is everyone?!”

At my own dinner party last winter I made reservations for the twenty-five guests who said they would attend. Eventually, twelve showed up (several of them over an hour late.) What's the problem here?

A bit of the issue may be flakiness. Generation Y is many things—motivated, involved, overachieving, and as a result, generally a bit overwhelmed. A fraction of the guests who miss parties usually offer the excuse “I’m so sorry, I completely forgot.” (I also suspect that ironically another reason young people miss events is that even though they have BlackBerries, iPhones and Palm Pilots, many young people don’t own day planners.)

And yet the real culprit behind the missing party guests may be that all of these poorly-attended soirees are organized via Facebook. It seems many people RSVP affirmatively to Facebook events and then never attend.

Part of the problem is that, when responding to an invitation for an event on Facebook, users have the option of checking “Maybe attending” which is convenient for a Facebook user who doesn’t want to have to commit to Friday night plans, but makes organizing a dinner party much more difficult for a hostess who needs to give a head count for a reservation or needs to make sure she has enough dessert for everyone.

The tenuousness of Facebook event guest lists also changes the way that companies and non-profits organize via Facebook. I’m told by a community organizer friend of mine that, when organizing over Facebook, a “Yes” for an event is actually a “maybe,” a “maybe” is a “no,” and a “no” is a “definitely not.”

Luckily, there are other more reliable ways of organizing events online. A few people I know have organized book parties via Evite and got relatively accurate head counts in advance. Could this be because Evite sends party attendees regular reminders of where they need to be and when? Facebook only puts event reminders in the sidebar of one’s profile homepage, and Facebook users are already bombarded with messages from groups and fan pages, so they’re likely to miss messages about events because they often clear their inboxes without reading anything.

My dinner party with phantom guests last semester was a touch traumatizing and I can’t say that I’ll be using Facebook to plan another party. But then again, because the restaurant reserved four tables for my party of twelve, it was the first dinner I’ve eaten out in Manhattan where my guests and I all had ample elbow room. I guess that’s not such a lose-lose after all!

P.S. Check out the latest in e-vite innovations from Paperless Post, a new online invitation service that offers a fancier selection of digital stationery. Trendcentral reports the site is still in beta, but hopes to take off soon with party planners.

About Liz Funk

Liz Funk is a freelance writer and college student. She has written for USA Today, Newsday, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, Girls' Life, and CosmoGIRL!, among other publications. Her first book, Supergirls Speak Out, about the pressure on girls to be perfect, will be published by Simon and Schuster in March of 2009. She writes a blog for the Albany, NY newspaper the Times Union and she edits the teen culture and politics blog GirlHeadQuarters.org. She is a senior at Pace University and lives in Manhattan. Her web-site is www.lizfunk.com.

Today's Ypulse Guest Post is from Nancy Gruver, CEO, New Moon Girl Media. Nancy attended a recent "unconference" in San Jose called Kids Online: Balancing Safety and Fun. I was in Florida and couldn't make it, but I wanted to know what happened. I figured you might, too, so I asked Nancy to write a recap for Ypulse readers…

A Report From Kids Online: Balancing Safety And Fun

Doing everything we can to provide kids with online safety seems like a no-brainer. From what I hear, parents, educators and law enforcement all worry about it. So a recent study by HighlightsParents.com surprised me with 75% of parents saying that their kids access the internet without supervision.

The very same week, I was excited to be part of the first-ever Kids Online: Balancing Safety and Fun "unconference" at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It came on the heels of the 7th Internet Identity Workshop, and both conferences were organized by Identity Commons, which addresses the many identity and privacy issues encountered online.

The brainchild of Joi Podgorny, Denise Tayloe and others, the day brought together many leaders of online services for children up to age 12. It combined small-group and full-group discussion of how companies like mine can improve children's online safety while not making it into a barrier for kids to use our sites. It hit home for me as our online practices and guidelines at NewMoonGirls.com put several barriers in place to maintain a safe and fun environment for girls 8-12. But we’re hearing from our members that they’d like us to remove those barriers. Even some parents tell us that we should leave it up to them to keep their daughter safe on our site.

But considering the research by HighlightParents.com, it seems that the majority of parents are depending on the online companies to keep things safe for their children. Some companies take this seriously and spend significant sums to obtain parental consent, moderate all posts and conduct other oversight. There are financial and time pressures to shortcut full moderation. That made a session on how to generate revenue (to cover the cost of moderation) without exploiting children by allowing advertising a lively discussion. It's a challenge, that's for sure!

But what about spaces like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, which say they are only for consumers age 13+ (wink, wink), but which kids are eager to join before they’re old enough? Is it possible to keep our kids safe there? The consensus was no. Most conference participants thought there needs to be higher expectations for the 13+ sites to keep 12-and-unders off them.

We're going to regroup monthly to plan additional meetings with one another, as well as organize online safety conferences for parents and kids. I came away hopeful that this day will lead to continuing improvement of online safety for our kids. As the internet changes every day, it's essential we always be looking for the next way to provide reasonable security for kids' wellbeing.

About Nancy Gruver

Nancy is founder of the international online community and magazine for girls ages 8-12, New Moon Girls, author of How To Say It To Girls: Communicating With Your Growing Daughter (Penguin Putnam, 2004) and blogs on girls’ issues and media. She is a national leader in using media to develop girls’ full potential. As pioneered by Gruver at New Moon Girl Media, Inc., truly collaborative work by girls and adults is an innovative counterbalance to societal pressures which lead many tween and teen girls to abandon their dreams and silence their voices.

This is the third "Last Five Things" feature from Youth Advisory Board member Megan Reid with help from her fellow board member Libby Issendorf. They interviewed other young people about "the last five things" they Googled. Remember, you can communicate directly with the Ypulse Youth Advisory Board by emailing them at youthadvisoryboard at ypulse.com Here's what they found…

Name: Erin
Age: 22
Location: Minneapolis, MN

1. "Flame Roseville, MN" — I am meeting my SJMC mentor there for lunch and I haven't had breakfast so I wanted to give myself something to look forward to by checking out the menu.

2. "travis barker rihanna umbrella remix" — Need I say more?! Love this song and looking for an .mp3 download since it wasn't on iTunes.

3. "puppy cam" — I was shocked to find that I forgot to bookmark the Puppy Cam URL on my work computer and I needed some puppy love in my life on a gloomy Minneapolis day.

4. "google chrome flash issues" — Not my favorite browser, but I prefer it more than IE for non work related things (gmail, twitter, puppy cam) and the Flash plug-in crashes all the time. Sad day.

5. "umn paratransit" — No more crutches! I get to cancel my paratransit rides, woo hoo! I never saved the phone number so I Googled it several times in the past three weeks. Was also met with a nice site redesign that included the Driven to Discover logo! Go Gophers

Name: Tanner
Age: 18
Location: Minneapolis, MN

1. "kerasotes block e showtimes" (movie showtimes)

2. "james bond apple trailer" — Going to tonight's midnight showing!!

3. "robert gates bio" — To keep or not to keep details…

4. "overheard in Mpls" — 'Cause I heard a guy on the bus talking about watching her pimp on judge joe brown…

5. "Mello Yellow vs Vault marketing" — 'Cause I'm sad that Mpls hates my fav bevry!

Name: Lauren
Age: 20
Location: Phoenix, AZ, currently studying abroad in England

1. "Sami" — As in the Sami People, the largest indigenous group in Europe. Renée Zellweger, one of my favorite (if not favorite) actresses by the way, is of Sami descent, according to IMDB.

2. "Tobey Maguire" — Because I noticed his name in the credits of Empire Records, but couldn't remember him actually in the movie. His scenes were edited out, apparently.

3. "Catullus" — The Greek poet. Googled him because my Classical & Decadent Lit professor said there was a website where you can listen to his poems in Latin. Found it, too.

4. "Brontë" — Simply because I wanted to confirm what specific accent was used over the 'e.' I was correct.

5. "XBox 360" — This one, I Googled so that I could check the difference in price between the US and UK versions (it's more expensive in the US), because I was explaining the difference between currency conversion (the exchange rate) and actual numeral figures (if a book in the UK costs £5, then that same book cost $5 in the US, usually, but not always).

Name: Samantha
Age: 21
Location: Missoula, MT

1. "Tropic Thunder"

2. "Pisces guys"

3. lyrics to "If I Were A Boy" Beyonce

4. lyrics to "Decode" Paramore

5. "Kevin Canty"  — A creative writing professor of mine

Name: Derron "JR" Wallace
Age: 23
Location: Currently teaching and researching in Phitsanulok, Thailand

1. "Internships in investment banking and consulting" — 'Cause I'm broke

2. "Obama" — Update on politics in the US

3. "News in Jamaica" — To keep posted on the political climate

4. "2009 Rhodes Scholars"– Because the results were posted this weekend

5. "YouTube Updates on Jamaican politics"

Compiled by Meg Reid

Megan is a college student, freelancer and hardcore bookworm. She began writing fashion articles for her hometown newspaper at age 15, and her work has since appeared in publications like Boston magazine, Mountain Living and CosmoGirl. Meg also loves theatre and the arts, and when she's not sending postcards, devouring YA novels, or reading up on 19th-century cultural studies, she's probably dragging someone along on a late-night ice cream/Starbucks run. Meg has lived in three (soon to be four) countries and five states, though she currently resides in Arizona.

and Libby Issendorf

After growing up on a farm in North Dakota, Libby Issendorf moved to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota. She discovered her passion for brands and media as a member of her school’s first-place National Student Advertising Competition team. After graduation in 2008, she began her career as a media analyst at an advertising agency. Libby works on media placement and targeting for national brands like General Mills and Land O Lakes. Outside of work, she loves blogging, playing sports, consuming gratuitous amounts of pop culture, the Minnesota Twins, being really geeky with her iPhone, and driving to see her boyfriend, who lives too far away.

Next month Facebook, Google, YouTube, MTV, and Howcast will sponsor a summit to mobilize young people against violence and oppression. It will take place at Columbia Law School from December 3-5, bringing together leaders of youth organizations from around the world. The global network, called the Alliance of Youth Movements, aims to craft a "field manual" on how to create social change using online tools.

For those who can't attend in person, the event will also be streamed live online by Howcast.com and on ThinkMTV.com, as well as via podcast afterwards. Look forward to a guest post from Roman Tsunder, President and Founder of Across 360 Media, one of the event's sponsors, after the event.

A lot of what we hear in relation to teens and social media is about how permanent and persistent it is. I'll never forget the Google engineer who attended one of my first talks at Cody's Bookstore in Berkeley telling me — your stuff really is online forever. But what if it's not? Or if you suddenly can't find it? I know my friends at Alloy might be bummed that I'm posting this (they bought Sconex and recently decided to shut it down), but I have been fascinated by the comments I have been getting on my post R.I.P. Sconex over the past few weeks. They have been trickling in after teens searching to find out what happened to Sconex discover my post. There is a visceral sense of loss and frustration that profiles these teens thought were permanent were not. That a site could actually shut down. That when they uploaded photos, posted poetry, etc., that it would be stored there forever — no need to save copies somewhere else. And to be fair to Alloy, I have been forwarding them the commenters' emails and know they are following up with these teens. From some of the comments:

It's just the place where I had letter from my friend that passed away. Pictures, letters, his phone number [I'm sure it no longer exists] but it was all saved there. Now it is all gone.

i am so upset. i had a journal on sconex, and i had been keeping it for a year. i have depression problems, and i would write where no one would see on the journal on sconex, and all my thoughts, all my revelations, and all my poems and other things i had saved on that journal are gone. and it hurts cause that was all my hard work. feels like a year of my life disappeared.

awww man, i had so much of my poetry and writing pieces….so muchhhhh pages and pages….now its alll goonne…

Its kind of crazy for it to just be deleted that was the only place where u can find ppl from the past …

I'm raising this issue because in these tough economic times, I think we could see more youth oriented sites shut down. And in an era of user generated content, that means people's comments, creations, photos and more end up disappearing for all practical purposes (just maybe not from Google's databases). Young people (and even not so young people) on these sites feel like they have helped to create these communities and even if they are no longer active, they view them as personal archives. Remember the outcry when Disney shutdown its Virtual Magic Kingdom? It makes me think that as part of talking to youth about their online lives, instead of just stressing the persistent nature of what gets posted, we should also stress the temporal nature of online businesses. On the business side, I think companies need to be mindful when shutting down a youth site to communicate to their users about what's happening and give them an opportunity to grab their "stuff" or help them recover it after the fact.

For those of you who don't follow my banal thoughts and minutia details of my life on Twitter, I have just returned from being on the road for two weeks. After our Boston event, I visited my grandmother in Maine, my in-laws in New Jersey, spoke to school librarians in Florida and visited my other grandmother, great aunt and cousins. The upside of travel for me is that I am able to get that rare "totally unwired" time offline on airplanes where my partial attention issues are tamed and I can focus. On my flight home, I read the 50-something page white paper just released today by the MacArthur Foundation. My friend, danah boyd, was one of the researchers/authors involved, and sent it to me a few days early. I'm going to post a very quick summary since you can now access the paper online, but wanted to comment first.

Since publishing Totally Wired over a year and a half ago, I have spoken to thousands of parents and educators about what teens and tweens are doing online. I have attempted to calm their fears, answer their questions and listen to their concerns. What's both refreshing and slightly perplexing about this research is that while reporting from the youth perspective and attempting to allay the reality that "Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games," I can imagine many of the adults I've spoken to reading the research but not feeling all that reassured by the report's failure to address any of the pitfalls of teens living in an "always on" digital culture (and I'm not talking about the debunked hysteria over online predators). Alluding to arguments that youth may be a social construction and that "Simple prohibitions, technical barriers, or time limits on use are blunt instruments; youth perceive them as raw and ill-informed exercises of power," makes sense from an academic perspective but doesn't quite succeed in convincing a parent who sees their child texting more than talking, involved in a case of nasty cyberbullying or stumbling onto internet porn (at a very young age), that it's all good.

Maybe it falls on people like me, Anne Collier, Derek Baird, Common Sense Media and others to take this research, digest it and broadcast the findings to the parent/educator populations we speak to on a regular basis in ways we know might make it more impactful. Personally, I'm up to the challenge and am excited to incorporate these findings into my upcoming talks. And now, a short summary from their press release…

There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.

- Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.

- Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.

Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.

- Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.

- The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.

Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.

- The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.

- Young people respect each other’s authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.

Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.

- Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.

- Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.

- "Geeked-out" learning opportunities are abundant – subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

Related:

'From MySpace to Hip Hop' In A Couple Paragraphs

It’s a big Internet out there, and we’re constantly searching in it. For parents who can't have their eyes everywhere at once, the lack of a filter continues to bring up concerns. The solution? Up for debate.

Some say the answer is systematic parental control. The latest version of Windows Vista, for instance, advertises, "a centralized location where [parents] can turn parental controls on and off; block or allow specific programs, games, and websites; and set controls for every aspect of [their] child's computer use." My question is: how do parents control the online activities that take place away from home? And what about those crafty kids that figure out a way to access the central panel and select the off options?

Another idea for keeping surfing safe online is to introduce a kid-friendly search engine like the recently re-launched visual search engine Quintura for Kids When I first went online not so many years ago, it was on AOL which prompted users to select settings by age (Kids, Teens, etc.) The restrictions seemed secondary to the enticing content that the welcome page had to offer me. Quintura's method is more akin to this positive approach of promising kid-centric content. Also, the approach doesn’t wed the kid to his or her home computer, but rather allows them to use their search engine of choice from anywhere on any machine or device. Of course, there’s no rule saying parents can’t employ both methods, but is there a limit to placing limits?

Political activism in the age of Facebook. Truly, an impressive thing to behold. Over the course of this election, I have seen friends use every tool in the site's ever-expanding toolbox– from groups to gifts to profile pictures– to get the vote out for their candidate. Interestingly, however, one of the most effective platforms for announcing solidarity has been the status update.

With teens and early twentysomethings slow to get aboard the Twitter train, statuses are the closest many come to microblogging. And for the past few months when answering the open-ended prompt ("What are you doing right now?"), it seems many have chosen to embrace the space as a virtual soapbox.

Of course, I bring this up on election day because the percentage of politic-centric statuses has significantly spiked. In fact, according to a story published yesterday in PC World many users (up to 1,215,555 as of this morning) have actually "donated" their statuses through the Causes Election Rally application. What does that mean exactly? From the article in PC World:

As part of the Causes Election Rally application on the social-networking site, users can pick to which candidate — either Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain — they would like to donate their status on Facebook. They also can donate their status simply to get out the vote.

Once users have done so, their status reflects their choice in this way: Elizabeth is the 470,111th person to donate her status to get out the vote for Barack Obama or John McCain, depending on which candidate the user chose.

The status update also includes a link to the application.

If a user changes his or her status after donating it, it will automatically be set to the "get out the vote" status at 12:01 a.m. local time on election day.

Lots happening in tween media land today including the Jonas Bros. making their leap to the big screen with a Farrelly brothers adaptation of the book series "Walter the Farting Dog." Lest the Olympics fade from our memories, the gymnastics stars are going on what looks like a very tween-friendly tour.

In online tween news, Miss O & Friends is teaming up with Albie Hecht’s Worldwide Biggies to develop a branded casual game based on the popular tween community. Tween site Shop Like Anna launches a celebrity section that "includes music, videos, and lyrics for users to sing along to, and members can follow the artists through direct updates and special interviews, releases, and performances." And Club Penguin celebrates its third anniversary in NYC with a big bash.

Finally, with the holidays around the corner and the financial news not getting much brighter, Campaign For A Commercial Free Childhood asks marketers to focus on parents (Media Post, reg. required) instead of kids this holiday season. And, a new organization with a mission I embrace: Parents For Ethical Marketing.

Today's Ypulse Youth Advisory Board feature is from Caroline Marques who will clue us in on how many teens are finding a new way to download their favorite music [for free]. Remember you can contact our board directly via email at youthadvisoryboard at ypulse.com.

Teens downloading music online is still alive and well thanks to this technique: tube converting. This time it’s not through Limewire, but through something closer to home: YouTube or any online video site. Since YouTube is where most teens watch music videos, it makes sense. Sites like http://file2hd.com, www.vconversion.com and www.vixy.net are programs where you just type a URL and save the song. With a small chance of getting viruses, and the enormous choice of songs, many teens feel this method is easier and safer.

Here's how it works. To listen to a song on YouTube, there needs to be a video. You take the URL of that video to one of the sites I mentioned above, and convert it into an mp4 (ipod file), for example. Of course, downloading illegal music isn’t good, but it’s also something I don't think teenagers (and many adults) will ever stop doing. Teens may hesitate on the issue of it being illegal, but then they rationalize what they're doing by thinking that they’re just taking it from YouTube, so it’s okay.

I have heard of lots of people switching from Limewire to tube converting because it doesn’t crash your computer. The only flaw [besides it being illegal and the sound quality not being that great] people have discovered right now is the speed; you need to find a good, fast site. But you can download anything to anywhere: your computer, ipod, cell phone or even PSP. Teenagers love this, you just need to copy, paste and save…

About Caroline Marques (aka "Caro")

Caroline is a high school student in Geneva, Switzerland. While Caroline lists sports, music and travelling as her hobbies, she also very much enjoys writing and reading. After being a teen adviser for NickMag, she thought Ypulse would be the perfect opportunity for a new start. While trying to keep up with the trends (or setting some of her own), dance classes, working on long papers and trying to master three new languages, she rarely has time to write the novel she wishes she could finish, though she is certain one day she will. Writing is never far from her thoughts.