The latest installment in our Youth Website Profile series is on kid social network TogetherVille. The site officially launched on Tuesday, so we thought we'd share our first impressions..

What it is.. According to their own description, "Togetherville is a social online community for families where parents create safe online neighborhoods for their kids (under 10) to play and connect with the real-life friends and family they already know and trust." Translation: A co-marketed social network that looks to appeal to kids/tweens with all the elements of Facebook, plus a few kid-minded extras.. and their parents with the ability to participate and closely monitor that environment.

Who it's for.. The closed social network component is targeted towards kids under 10 (roughly 6-10) — too young to make the cutoff for Facebook, but old enough to want to partake in posting/commenting, collecting apps, playing edutainment-type games and other social activities like sharing videos or buying virtual gifts (virtual good sales are also the main revenue stream for the site..). Parents logging in to TogetherVille are invited/required to use their own Facebook log-ins to create an account, which then identifies the friends and family already on TogetherVille. From there, parents can send their kids virtual gifts, review their activities and admire the works of virtual art their child has created.

What works for us… Safety comes first, but it doesn't set the tone for the space. What I really appreciate about TogetherVille is the fact that parents aren't just monitoring for the sake of monitoring, but actually invited to become active participants in the space in their own rite through gift-giving, wall postings, etc. While slightly hard to imagine as a "digital native," for a generation that grows up expecting to find parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and everyone else they know in these digital spaces, normalizing that type of online interaction and building on it (reading about parents checking out virtual art totally made me imagine virtual fridges) makes sense. I have to chalk some of the credit for that balance to the great team of advisors the site recruited including longtime Ypulse friend Anne Collier of ConnectSafely.org and Ann McCormick, founder of the Learning Company; Cory Ondrejka, co-founder of Second Life among others.

Challenges.. While that type of harmonious co-existence may be in the not-so-distant future of parenting online, I still wonder whether the tween spectrum of the target audience (the 8-10 year-olds) wouldn't bristle at this degree of parental supervision. The same type of inclusiveness that draws parents into Togetherville, might take some warming up to for those kids who have had more exposure to sites with more free reign.  The fact is a lot of these pre-teens already are on Facebook (some with parental consent, some not) and learning about digital citizenship as they go (see this recent study). That and the fact that so many other social networks are jumping on the tween/kid bandwagon, might make it all the more important that the other fun elements pack something special. I have no doubt that's the idea, but I'd love to hear some testimonies from real tweens who have compared what's out there. Overall though, we have to salute a site built on the idea of imparting (but not pushing) lessons about positive online behavior and what it means to be a good digital citizen.

Categorized under: Tweens, Web

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