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Safe online chat for kids: KidFu launched!
An old friend, of parents as well as kids, is back - quite amazing news in these days of few kids' Web site debuts. All the best things about FreeZone.com - once one of the safest spaces for kids on the Internet (having folded last year in the dot-com meltdown) - have reincarnated in the form of KidFu.com.
Four members of FreeZone's management team - Drew Scott, Brian Eagan, Joi Podgorny, and Chris Rettstatt - were not ready to let the safe kids' community go and they liked working together, Drew told us in a phone interview. So they took everything they learned at FreeZone (and not much else - federal regs required them to shred FZ's database of some 500,000 young registered users) and started up KidFu, "the way of the kid."
We like the name a lot, so we asked Drew about it. "Kung fu is such a great phrase, we hoped to torque it a little. 'Fu' means 'action,' a vibrant feeling," explained Drew, whose partner, Chris, studied Chinese and taught kids English in China. "'Kid Fu' kind of implies this discipline, or the skills it takes to being a kid, which has its own set of rules, its own schools of thought inside of it. There's an art to it, there are skills you need to know."
And of course any martial art requires balance. Grownups appreciating the art and skill of being a kid balanced with kids understanding the benefits of grownup wisdom, especially where safety and privacy are concerned. Kidfu.com takes these very seriously, despite its kid-friendly way of describing its policies. The site consciously teaches young users online safety in the process of protecting them.
"We don't want to be scare-mongers about the dangers of the Net," Drew said, "so we have to do a good job of saying, 'Beware the dark forest, but when on the path it's a great nature walk. Off the path there are wolves."
Not that a lot of online kids aren't aware of this. In fact, KidFu is banking on the fact that children want to be safe.
"One thing we learned at FreeZone is that kids really craved the safety," Drew said. He includes emotional safety in the mix. "It opened up the discussion," allowing for much more self-expression because kids don't have to waste time "defending myself if I say something stupid," Drew explained. Otherwise, for kids it's "not safe to bring up something deeper. Having monitors in the room makes it a civil discussion - they obey the rules more, whether they know them or articulate them themselves."
This former FreeZone team also learned that kids have interesting things to say. "There's a lot of skepticism out there about kid community - people say kids don't have anything to say. They look at chat and see short messages about how was your day, what's your favorite boy band, what's the weather like there, and what they miss, we felt, was when deeper conversations took place (how I'm feeling, I'm not relating to Dad, I'm having a tough time with homework - things that are easy to gloss over). We disagreed. There's so much there.... As a staff at FreeZone, we looked at the transcripts and said to teach other, 'Look at this amazing exchange." [For concrete examples, see "What happens if you get it right?" down a ways in an article KidFu co-founder Chris Rettsttat wrote for fellow online-community professionals.]
Thus the driving force at KidFu: interaction. "Community was an afterthought at FreeZone. We spent so much energy on games and the content areas," Drew told us. "We were always trying to attract kids to the writing side." So they knew that "what would make KidFu different was the community." Even the games in the site play a supporting role. "Our challenge is to build games that also build community. There are really great ways to do multi-player games," Drew said.
KidFu plans to have kid-written stories, polls, and celebrity interviews, but the main features are...
- Chat - monitored by "trained adult safety specialists called chat jockeys, or CJs, [who] bust anyone who tries to break the rules ... and have tools to remove messages" as well as rule-breakers.
- Discussion/bulletin boards - screened by CJs before any postings appear on the boards.
- Note Passer notes. We asked Drew if Note Passer is like instant messaging, since kids like IM-ing so much: "We've seen that, too, that kids really like IM. Obviously it's a thorny thing because of the ability to send private messages from kid to kid.... We wanted to offer something similar and give that flavor but also cleave to our super-conservative safety ideals. Everything is looked at first before it gets to its destination." KidFu will also train "Jr. Jobbers" - assistant CJs - to help monitor the proceedings and learn online safety from the inside.
And what age group is all this for? we asked. "We say 7 to 17. That reflects what we what we saw at FreeZone. On the content side [polls, stories, games], we saw kids as young as 7. In the chat area we saw kids who were 15, 16, 17. It was the 10-to-14-year-olds who are using it most - the kids with typing and social skills who like being part of community."
Users will have to pay for this service, in these days of diminished dot-coms. The subscription fee is $10 a month (1-3 kids) per family, $50 for six months, and $95 a year. KidFu says school and other nonprofit rates are available too; they include lesson plans, ways to integrate community into learning. There isn't much posted on the "B-boards" yet (and we checked out a chatroom before school was out in most of the US, which meant low traffic there, too, naturally), so if you sign up your kids, they can help populate the space and steer the conversation!
For further reading and an inside look at building and maintaining safe online community for kids, see Chris Rettstatt's recent article in Online Community Report. Here's KidFu's press release for the site's launch.
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