Internet adoption amongst children is at an all-time high; 95% of  12 to 15 year olds have internet access at home via a desktop computer and the time spent online increasing yearly up from 7 to 11 hours per week between 2004 and 2009 - it goes without saying that kids will want to be a part of the biggest online community in existence.

One million British children aged seven to 12 visit Facebook everyday, despite the social network requiring members to be aged 13 and over

While Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards commented favourably on the high figure stating “almost universal use of the internet at home by 12 to 15s – both for their education as well as their entertainment – is a positive step forward”, concerns have been raised about children and their exposure on sites including Facebook.

Too much, too young?

An Ofcom study revealed that 54% of 8 to 15 year olds and 1 in 5 10 year olds have a social networking profile on sites such as Facebook, up from 45% in 2009. This equates to the same percentage of adult users. Furthermore a study by Mintel reveals over one million British children under 12 use Facebook daily, with only 5% saying they did not use the site at all. That’s a staggering statistic for a site that requires users to be 13 to sign up.

Figures issued by Facebook state that the site closes 20,000 underage user accounts per day, a mere drop in the ocean compared to statistics found by intelligence service Neilsen who estimate 7 million underage users across the world.

These statistics are hardly surprising considering the large number of products and services children come into contact with that point to exclusive or additional content on Facebook. Whether its television programs like The X Factor or celebrities and popstars Beiber and the Kardashians, young people want to connect with their favourite stars and shows with social networks offering a gateway to get closer than ever before. What is surprising however, is not just the number of parents aware of children under 13 setting up accounts on social media sites, but the number of parents actually helping them do so.

Parental responsibility?

A recent study by Microsoft revealed that far from restricting children’s use of the site, parents are are actively helping their kids to create accounts regardless of Facebook terms which state profile accounts for children under 13, or the setting up of accounts on behalf of another person, is not allowed.

“There has been outrage about underaged children being on Facebook and as it turns out, many parents are not only okay with it — they are helping their children set up accounts” said Danah Boyd, a Microsoft researcher and co-author of Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook About Age.

A survey from Harris Interactive randomly sampled 1007 parents aged 26 and over, with children aged 10 to 14. More than half of parents who had 12-year-olds knew they were signed up and worryingly 35% helped them.

If parents are prepared to bypass rules to allow children to sign up, albeit for their own protection, what example does this set to children about rule breaking later on in life? Whilst some parents argue that they do not want to be told how to be a good parent, others claimed they want their kids to get used to using the internet early.

They may have a point. Mark Zuckerberg made a speech at an innovation in schools summit supporting the use of Facebook for the under 13s, saying the age limit would be challenged at “some point”. Currently restricted under Children’s Online Private Protection Act (COPPA), aUS law that gives parents control over what information websites collect from children under 13, he talked of the educational benefits Facebook could bring to the young. ”My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age,” Zuckerberg said. “Because of the restrictions we haven’t even begun this learning process. If they’re lifted then we’d start to learn what works.”

Changing media consumption patterns for kids

Developments in technology and the sharp increase in digital media adoption have driven discussions in American Congress to make updates to the COPPA to cover all social networking sites and mobile apps. In the UK however, the law does not restrict users under 13-years-old from using the site, although Facebook’s terms and conditions do.

So why are so many children under 13 clamouring to sign up? So what does all this mean? Considering the rapidly rising rate of internet and mobile adoption amongst Generation Z (or iGen, referring to those born between 1997 and 2003) children are consuming more and more digital media due to increasing ease of access, just not all of it legitimately.

Children spend so much time online that the study conducted by Ofcom revealed children aged 12 to 15 would rather lose access to TV over other technology. 28% of those surveyed said the item they would miss most should they not have access to it would be their mobile, with internet at 25%, compared to only 18% citing television.

Mobile is now growing at a faster rate than the internet seeing a significant growth with children aged 8 to 11, rising from 55% a year ago to 61% in 2011. Around half of all British children aged 14 and under now have their own mobile phone and a tenth of those admitting to using Facebook everyday do so on their phones.

The answer…

The responsibility here lies with not just educating parents about the risks of allowing their children to have Facebook accounts, the ease of posting inadvertantly provocative images for all to see, but with advertisers who should uphold their ethical responsibilities.

Research found that 41% of 8 to 14 year olds surveyed use Facebook after school between 5-8pm. Not only does this pinpoint the key time for companies marketing products to the iGeneration aged 13 and over, but highlights a hotspot for parents to take additional care supervising online activity.

One solution is for only parents to know account passwords and monitor activity on Facebook at all times. Comments on ABC15’s Facebook page in response to the question “What do you think about parents that are doing this? Are children under 13 too young to be on Facebook, or is it OK as long as the privacy settings are locked down?” returned quite revealing answers, with some parents allowing children as young as 5 an account under a fake name with no images:

Whether by peer pressure to fit in amongst friends, playing games online or by sheer curiosity, it was Commodore 64 of the eighties, Tamagotchis of the nineties – children will always want to have the latest gadget. It just so happens that this particular toy is also played by adults and until we are able to break this fascination, how can we expect children not to want to join in too ?

Click here for the full Ofcom report.

See what else Zuckerberg has bought in previous weeks.

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We’ve got 10+ iPhone/iPod applications in development right now – yee-haw! There’s some really exciting stuff going through our office right now. But we want more!

Not only are we offering a free brainstorm for all iPhone apps but we are looking for clients (new and old) to work with in developing apps for the emerging platforms of Android (Google’s phone), Nokia and Microsoft. We’re even offering 25% off development fees.

If you are interested in being part of something exciting then just get in touch with us – best to speak to Benn Achilleas.

In August of 2008, Internet Explorer celebrated its 7th birthday. In browser years that is pretty old. I was still a teenager waiting to go to university. It was a long time ago! The problem that most developers have with IE6 (other than wasting countless hours of our lives trying to support it) is that we now live in a world where everyone talks about ‘accessibility’ and ‘web standards’, and IE6 simply does not comply. It is out of date, insecure and terrible at rendering pages to modern standards. Yet nearly 30% of internet users still use it as their main browser (W3counter).

Everyone wants their websites to use the latest cutting edge technology, but a significant proportion of people still continue to use a product that is incapable of supplying that to them.

So why have people been so slow to upgrade? one theory is that companies still have it installed as their default browser and it would be too expensive and time consuming to roll it out across hundreds or thousands of machines. While this may be true there has to come a point when everyone catches up with the modern world.
The last few years, particularly since the introduction of Firefox as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s web browsers, there has been a steady rise in the number of anti IE websites on the internet including:

“IE Death March,” “STOP IE6” and “Save the developers”

They all encourage web users to upgrade their web browser to a newer version, be it Microsoft’s more standards compliant IE7 or an alternative browser such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Apple’s Safari.

The relative success of browsers such as Firefox and Safari wrestling some market share away from Microsoft means the worm may be starting to turn. InfoQ point out that “Since attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been rapidly losing market share. As the end of 2008 approaches, significant online services, vendors and web frameworks are dropping support for IE6.”

Some of the big names that are dropping their support for the browser include Apple’s MobileMe (the rebranding of the .Mac service), 37signals (a prominent online software supplier), and Facebook, which now recommends upgrading to a newer browser.

It is this last one that could sound the death knell for IE6. If the world’s foremost social networking site ends up ending all support for the browser, then it can’t be long before the rest of the computing world follows suit. I for one hope that this day comes sooner rather than later.

So Google have signaled intent with the launch of their new internet browser that will take the fight to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer [yuk] and Mozilla’s FireFox [yay]. Here with his 2 cents (or pence, depending on your geo-code) is one our team developers, Wojciech…

Will Google chrome change anything in already overcrowded market? Does it delivers any better web experience? Will anyone still use it after driven by curiosity people will give it try? Hordes of bloggers trying to answer for those questions, here is one more attempt

Feature set delivered by Chrome compared to Opera and Firefox seems to be quite limited – you will not find integrated email client or RSS reader, but it would be against Google philosophy – it encourages us to use web based gmail and reader, fine. Chrome doesn’t exactly show us any features we haven’t seen before, but it adds at least one important thing: most of you probably heard about Google gears but only small minority actually bothered to test this technology – to use it with IE or Firefox you need to download and install chunk of software and do we really want to clutter our machines even more in exchange of hypothetical benefits of gears? But chrome has this technology onboard – now when you open your Google Docs or Reader in chrome you might notice new small “offline” link in the top nav bar. Click it and chrome will cache your docs or RSS stories, then enjoy Slashdot, BBC Sport, Engadget or “Invoices pending payment” (whatever is your personal preference) in the cosy Jubilee Line train on your way home

Will this feature will be enough to beat Firefox? In my opinion: no. Real power of Firefox are tons of plug-ins and add-ons, even if (”if” is the keyword here – waiting for someone to benchmark Chrome vs. others) Firefox is slightly slower or has larger memory footprint we will still use it as we love AdBlock, Live HTTP Headers or Firebug (OK, if you’re a not web developer your life might be complete without the latter two, and to be fair Chrome contains quite useful Element Inspector which covers part of features of Firebug).

Life goes on, masses of Windows users will stay (un)happy with IE, unless Google marketing department will persuade hardware manufactures to natively install Chrome and make it default browser. And users who can actually tell the difference between web browsers will continue love-hate relationship with Firefox.

This is beta version of Chrome – will we see update and Mac/Linux version anytime soon? Or will it stay in beta stage for years, as quite a few Google products we’ve seen?

If you’re short of a website, and have eight hours to spare, and $10 then apparently you too can join the online revolution. At least you can according to Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal.

It’s easy to make a website, Ms. Vara explains. All you need is a homepage, an “About” page and a “Contact” page. To improve the design of your site all you need is some “HTML programming code”. You don’t even need any skills to do that! “All you need to know is that a block of HTML — essentially, a bunch of gobbledygook words and symbols — can add extra features to your site.” “Wow”, I can hear you say, “give me some of those features!”. Ms. Vara suggests simply grabbing some “handy HTML blocks” and popping them on your site, “as easily as copying and pasting text in Microsoft Word.

I always find these kind of articles fascinating. Is it only the field of IT that has this blind enthusiasm? I’ve never heard anyone suggesting that “you too could be a dentist”. Surely given a pair of pliers and a Dremel Multi drill I too could be a dentist?

I think the sooner people stop thinking they can make a website using Microsoft Word the better. But maybe I’m just being elitist.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft acquisition talks have finally come to an end  – and Google seem to have come out of it as the clear winner.

After a long-running discussion, Yahoo! have decided to partner with Google, building on their recent ad partnership. Yahoo! will now display Google ads next to its search results in the US and Canada from September. Google and Yahoo! also plan to make their instant messaging tools compatible. In total, Yahoo! are expected to gain $800m in additional annual revenues from the deal.

Now you can also have your music added to your message signatures so everyone can see what you are listening too – and even click through to listen themselves. It’s a nice interaction with FoxyTunes – which is one of the best Firefox extensions ever. Not tested if it ties in with Last FM. I love it when technology starts to ‘connect the dots’ like this as it enriches dialog between consumers and makes a richer environment for digital marketing at large.

- Loving the tune? Facebook message with song signature

While on the subject of Firefox, why not help them set a new world record for most software downloads in a day. At the time of writing this, there are still 11 hours to go and currently the UK is third in the world, just behind Canada and way off the US (of course). Interestingly, the UK has delivered more downloads than Russia, Brazil and China!

– Firefox download day world record attempt

Firefox’s true aim is to step up from number two to number one in the browser market, but their current 10-15% of market share is dwarfed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer at 80-85%. Slowly people are seeing the light and making the switch but Microsoft’s monopoly deal with PC manufacturers means that a huge percentage of users still us the browser that came with their PC. Which sucks for us digital marketing people as Internet Explorer, particularly IE7 is a pile of horse sh*t and requires additional resources to deliver the same display as Firefox.

Microsoft have developed a new technology that can rapidly extract forensic data from laptops, phones, cameras and other electronical devices. Great for helping border control agents in identifying incriminating material – and hopefully preventing the need for them and other law enforcement agencies to seize innocent computers!

The technology is called COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor), and is software built into a USB drive.  Although it’s only just coming to light, it has been in use since last June, having been distributed to 350 different law enforcement agencies. Microsoft have said that they developed the device after an attack of conscience, and not as a way of making even more money.

For more details on how it works, visit http://mashable.com/2008/04/29/microsoft-cofe/

Ahead of the upcoming Social Media Influence conference (to be held on 4th June in London) the following YouTube Corporate Top 10 list has been compiled – comprising of videos which appear within the first 10 results in a search of the company name. Each one has been viewed over 1 million times and generated hundreds of comments.

Over 80 million YouTube videos are watched every day, making YouTube one of the most influential forms of media today. We can’t understand why some brands don’t value YouTube’s power and recognise the potential threat that it could have to their reputation – take the Disney porn for example.

Visit Social Media Influence if you want to view the videos. They suggest that while you’re watching, “ask yourself this question – do you know how your company looks on YouTube?”

Here’s their top 10 (in descending order):