ScuttlePad

I just tried the site out and it seemed to load pretty slowly but other than that it is a fab idea. I am sick of my nephews keeping tabs on me through facebook and I am not sure that is a place for them to hang out with so many creepy adults on there. Myspace is even worse. Talk about sickos online. Keep the kids on a kid network!

Kid's Twitter, with a touch of Facebook, just launched, and aiming to be something new in a fairly crowded social networking market. For a start, it's aimed only at the 6-11 age group. Secondly, kids are allowed to communicate using ONLY words from an approved words list. This will cut out the pointless, childlike drivel you find on more adult sites. ScuttlePad claims the concept is intended to be educational and through it, kids will learn about the use of language and sentence structure. And I presume that the conventions of texting aren't going to be allowed, so it will be interesting to see how many kids that alienates from the start. The restriction will stop bad language, but it's also censorship in a very rigid form, and I can see kids wanting to know why they can't use the words they hear at home. There are going to be some debates over this for sure, but it's a brave concept and clearly intended to be a major attraction to parents.

The site promotes itself as wanting to involve parents, though no adult accounts are allowed. It's a kid place. I guess they hope masked predators are going to get fed up only being allowed to use the approved words, anyway, but at this time they only require email validation from an alleged-parent, which more or less guarantees a few unwelcome visitors snooping around if only out of curiosity. This is not to say that they don't take security safely, clearly they do. And they will be approving content manually, so no naughty photos welcome here for a start.

The site is simple in design, but attractive to kids, and scores by the prominent use of the words "fun" and "safe", words that will resonate with children and parents, respectively. I was surprised by the lack of a "for parents" link to help adults evaluate the project, and at the time of writing you'll have to go to the "blog" link at the end of the page instead, but maybe that's another "kids only" message for the rest of us.