Webware

Totlol offers a collection of community-vetted, kid-safe YouTube videos.

(Credit: Totlol)

Totlol developer Ron Ilan had enough.

It had been just over a year since he launched his site of community-vetted YouTube videos--where kids can watch Elmo, cutesy animal videos, or "Big Comfy Couch" without the accidental off-color search mishap. And, despite its popularity, he couldn't find a way to make it sustainable or survivable without adverse impacts.

So, earlier this month, at two in the morning, he wrote a long explanatory note to Totlol's users that ended with, "I'm closing Totlol down. Life goes on." Then he went to sleep.

"I woke up to hundreds of messages," he says. While Ilan was asleep, TechCrunch wrote a short post about the closing of Totlol and "they stirred things up," says Ilan.

Parents and fans wrote Ilan imploring him to find some solution to keep Totlol from closing. He's found one for now but says he doesn't know how long it will last.

Ilan conceived of Totlol while digging through YouTube looking for videos that were appropriate for his young son. As he built up a list of bookmarks with suitable clips, he thought other parents were probably doing the same.

When he began building Totlol in 2008, YouTube had just released an upgrade that allowed independent developers to use YouTube as a platform. So, Ilan developed Totlol as an application in which users can create profiles, manage their favorites, and do specific searches.

A YouTube video plays via Totlol.

(Credit: Totlol)

Once launched, Totlol steadily grew; it went from Ilan's few bookmarks to more than 15,000 clips submitted by hundreds of parents. Since then, Totlol has received tons of press, was an official honoree in the 2009 Webby Awards, was named in the Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites in 2008 by PC Magazine, and even has an iPhone application.

"The site has its niche," he says, "and has its love." While the audience is modest, it's attached. The problem is, like so many other Internet start-ups, Ilan cannot find a way to monetize Totlol.

When using YouTube as a platform, there are various restrictions that state it cannot be combined with any sort of marketing or advertising. Obviously, this makes it difficult to create revenue to hire staff. "The Web site doesn't run itself," Ilan says, "it needs some minimum care." After the outcry at his decision to shut Totlol down, he began to look for other ways to make the site work.

The solution he's temporarily come up with is to separate content from advertising. Now, when going to Totlol's home page, users see an advertiser-supported catalog of videos but cannot view any content until they register. Once logged in, though, the ads disappear.

However, this isn't an ideal situation for Ilan. "This setup is not something I'm proud of," he wrote on Totlol, "and certainly not what I intended Totlol to be."

Ilan will try this model for a few months to see if it works. If not, he may ask members to either donate or pay a fee and hope other ideas will pop up so he can avoid closing Totlol down. As Ilan said in the note he wrote at two in the morning, "I just can't support and develop it all by myself anymore."

COPPA, which became law in 1998, requires verifiable parental consent before a child under 13 can provide personally identifiable information to a Web site that caters to children. Expanding the law to cover teens till they're 18, according to the report, would "require Web sites to obtain more information about both minors and their parents, which runs counter to the original goal of the Act: protecting the privacy of minors." Ultimately, say the authors, "this would actually make minors less 'safe online.'"

In this podcast, the report's co-author, PFF Senior Fellow Adam Thierer, explains the original COPPA law and why, in his opinion, the expanded law could have a chilling effect on the free speech rights of minors.

The podcast runs 11:30

Listen now: Download today's podcast

KidZui's closed-system browser for children upgrades to version 4, but fans of the program won't notice many changes initially. Available for Windows and Mac and as a Firefox extension, the update encompasses a range of changes, including optimization for Netbooks, client- and server-side caching, simplified animations, and a number of bug fixes. Most importantly, the program is supposed to run faster, although that was hard to judge from 10 minutes of use. It's not slower, though.

KidZui 4 looks a lot like KidZui 3, but with a few options to better control the clutter.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The big changes that kids and their parents will pick up on mainly involve smoother integration between the interface and the features. There's now a grid button on the bottom right that allows kids to jump back to their most recent search results after they've proceeded to a page. Videos now can be set to auto-play in the default mode as well as the maximized "Go Big" mode. The Explore and Friends navigation bars on the left and right side are now minimizable, expanding screen real estate for larger video and image viewing. This last change is significant since KidZui's interface can often feel cluttered and chaotic.

Changes to the social-networking tools include removing online/offline notifications from the Event stream in MyKidZui, which creates more space for tags and sharing with friends. Kids can also add an unlimited number of channels to keep track of. Overall, though, the program feels like it hasn't changed much since version 3, and that's a good thing for fans.

SmartyCard, which launches at Demo 09 on Tuesday, is both compelling and disturbing. The well-crafted site, which is aimed mainly at third- to sixth-graders, is compelling because it not only engages children in fun and interesting learning activities, but it adds an element of incentive by rewarding success with points that they can use to purchase virtual or real merchandise.

That very incentive is what also makes SmartyCard disturbing.

(Credit: SmartyCard)

I'm not saying that the carrot approach--giving kids rewards for doing well--can't be appropriate and effective. But I'm somehow bothered by the idea of an automated system that puts kids through their paces, however enjoyable and educational they may be, and then dishes out rewards with Mom and Dad's money.

When my kids were that age, my wife and I spent lots of time interacting with them at the kitchen table, through reading books and doing homework, and--yes--sometimes in front of a computer. But the rewards our children received for doing well were more emotional than financial.

Sure, there was the occasional trip to the ice cream parlor to celebrate a good test score or a bit of extra effort and, yes, we occasionally bought our kids gifts as a way of congratulating them for a job well done, but there was a decidedly human touch to it, and it wasn't a quid pro quo.

Like most parents, we strived to instill a sense of pride and work ethic in our children without teaching them that every good accomplishment necessarily translates into acquiring more stuff.

That's not to say that there might not be situations in which a service like SmartyCard makes sense. If a parent feels that a bit of extra help from a Web site might be all that a kid needs to put in some extra effort, than I'm glad that SmartyCard is there to serve that family. But I'm not 100 percent comfortable with the idea of a mechanized system for rewarding achievement. At least at younger ages, it would be best if parents played the activities with their children.

Parents buy SmartyCard points that kids unlock by doing well on activities. Ten bucks buys you 5,000 points, but it takes 10,000 points for a kid to buy $10 worth of credit on iTunes. Some deals are better than others. 5,000 points will buy a month's membership on Club Penguin, but the cost of those points is still quite a bit more than the $5.95 fee a parent would pay to buy a month directly from that site.

I wish that SmartyCard could offer parents something closer to a one-to-one value, and make its money from commissions from the vendors that provide the service or sell the merchandise. General Manager Chris Carvalho said the company hopes to negotiate such deals over time. Of course, an argument can be made that the extra money parents are paying is well worth it, if the lure of SmartyCard points gets their kids to study harder

. I like the fact that kids can use SmartyCard for free with access to the educational games, but not the merchandise rewards. That opens up the activities to kids whose parents can't afford to buy points or simply prefer not to. And if the games are compelling enough, that might be all the incentive some kids need.

Besides, if they do well, you can always take them out for ice cream.

Larry talks with SmartyCard General Manager Chris Carvalho.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

When you first look at it, KidZui seems a bit like a kiddified Flock, a Web browser with social networking rolled in. Children using Windows or Macs can find their favorite YouTube videos, rate content using tags, and share opinions, all from a colorful interface with big buttons and clear, clean labeling.

Billing itself as "the Internet for kids," it turns out that KidZui is anything but a standard kids' browser, and what makes it so unique is precisely why it's such a safe tool for children to use.

What you see when you log in to KidZui.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

KidZui is a closed system of pre-approved content, and although it seems to function like a browser, there's no way to use it to access the Internet directly. Instead, all the content that's available from KidZui has been approved by a group of editors. These moonlighting parents, teachers, and retired teachers started from a database built by a spider that checked dmoz directories across the Internet--similar to how Yahoo searches the Web. From there, they looked at each video, image, and Web site that KidZui lets children see, and then added the safe ones to an age-delineated whitelist. Four-year-olds, for example, can not see content that 10-year-olds can.

When KidZui launched in March 2008, the list of approved content included around 500,000 sites that, according to KidZui's chairman and CEO Cliff Boro, took two years to build. Eight months on, that's now expanded to more than a million pieces of content, with 50 editors still contracted to review new material and purge links that have changed or are dead.

Being closed doesn't mean that that the KidZui experience is limited. More secure than a haphazardly-applied algorithm from a Web blocker, but less limiting in part because it includes kid-appropriate social networking, KidZui in many ways seems to offer a more comprehensive Internet experience to children.

The Zui, the KidZui avatar, features customizations that draw kids in.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The basic version is free, and includes a solid core of features for both children and their justifiably worried parents. Remember the old use of Whitehouse.com, and how easy it was to get there by mistyping whitehouse.gov?

Since KidZui is closed to actual browsing, accidentally or intentionally reaching improper content means that's no longer an issue. There are three main tools for kids to explore the Internet with. There's a search bar at the top, a left-nav sidebar organized by topics including science, movies and TV, games, sports, and animals, and a bottom scroll bar that shows your most frequently-viewed Web sites. KidZui's URI bar includes predictive text similar to Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, but only for the pre-approved content. Below the URI bar are tabs for your default Welcome page, Games, New, Most Popular, and Most Tagged.

Once you start looking at content, three new tabs replace the default five. The Photo and Video tabs work much like Google's Image and Video searches, where you type into the URI bar what you're looking for and the tab automatically narrows it down to the specific type of content that you want under that topic. The Web tab allows for more open, Web browser-style exploration of the whitelisted content.

The right-side nav is taken up by the social-networking features, but again there's little cause for concern by parents. Kids can not e-mail or instant message each other, and there is no personal information that gets revealed when your child "friends" another. They can only see each other's avatars, known as Zuis within the program, usernames, and recently viewed or recently tagged content. By emphasizing the sharing of likes and dislikes as they pertain to videos, photos, and Web sites, and eliminating the ability to communicate directly, KidZui is able to keep the kids who use it focused on positive experiences.

KidZui also hopes to keep kids from being distracted by other local content on the computer by always running in a maximized, full-screen window. It also requires two clicks on the Exit button on the bottom right to fully log out, and parents can require that they enter in their username and password to prevent kids from accessing the rest of the computer.

After the parent has registered KidZui, the child needs to create an online identity. Kids can customize their avatars clothing, skin, face, and hair to a limited degree in the free version, with more options available if you upgrade. The more kids explore via KidZui, the more choices get unlocked, including background options, additional emoticon tags, and Zui customizations. Parents get weekly updates on all the sites that their kids have been looking at.

MyZui pages let kids create their own channels and see where they've been.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Free KidZui is fully functional, but the paid version definitely offers more to both parents and kids. Among the additions, children get more tags for rating content, more avatar clothing, and more backgrounds, while parents get the ability to block individual sites, and can view an unlimited history of the child's browsing. Parents who upgrade can also add Web sites, such as a personal family site, that they approve of on their own through the parental control panel. Upgrading also gains access to a Homework Helper feature, too, divided by subject and academic level from pre-school through eighth grade.

There's no such thing as perfect software, and KidZui is no exception to the rule. I noticed that when you're using the program in Windows, you can use the ALT+Tab hot key combo to access other concurrently running programs. On Vista, this can be used to gain access to the desktop. Walt Mossberg found a somewhat circuitous way to turn up a story on the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal when he looked at the program when it launched.

Even with these holes, KidZui looks as effective as anything I've seen at balancing the dual concerns at play when trying to educate kids with and about the Internet. It's important and difficult to give them the freedom to explore and learn how to use the Web while creating an environment that parents can feel they have control and influence over. KidZui beautifully manages to navigate those concerns and their implications, and is a must for any parent with children under the age of 13 to check out.

There aren't enough down-to-earth, Web-based tools to help you visualize a greener home. The Green Building Studio is for architects, while Lucid Design Group's energy dashboard is found only in a slim number of buildings. Yahoo's Green House is pretty, yet it can't be personalized.

By contrast, the Department of Energy's frightful Energy Hog.

But I just wasted a fine chunk of the afternoon playing with a kids' Web site that makes a great model for what I'd like to see for adults. My Abodo is an excellent, Flash-based interface that walks you through building a virtual green home. Created in part by the British government, it's more happy-go-lucky than our Department of Energy's Energy Hog games (though not as fun as killing cows in the McDonald's Video Game that it reminded Josh of). My Abodo lets you hand-pick various parts of the house, from the flowery green roof to your own vegetable garden, while adjusting trash in the nearby dump accordingly. When you're done, you can embed your abode on a blog or other Web site, just like so below.

I'm crossing my fingers that someone might offer some freebie to bring green building down to earth for grown-ups. Google Earth (more here) and SketchUp provide so much potential for environmental imaging and modeling. Imagine if the search giant also served up an amateur architecture tool that let you design buildings online from the inside out.

"Do as I say, not as I do," probably summarizes the financial advice of many parents. Intuit, by contrast, aims for its new, Web-based Quicken Kids & Money to teach young children fiscal discipline while demanding attention from parents in the process. This $99 yearly subscription includes browser-based interfaces for parents and their 5- to 8-year-olds. The time seems ripe for an interactive service like this, given advertisers' colossal efforts to capture the hearts and minds of children along with the wallets of their parents.

Designed for integration into household habits rather than as a babysitting tool, Quicken Kids & Money is supposed to require 20 minutes of weekly care after the initial setup. Intuit suggests that parents dole out $20 to $32 monthly to each child. Online calendars help regulate chores and payments, and a social networking area allows parents to get in touch with each other.

Accompanying the service are transparent envelopes to hold money for quick cash, sharing, long-term savings, and medium-term savings. The Quick Cash envelope is supposed to keep 10 percent of income, while each of the other three envelopes contain 30 percent.

Why no piggy bank? Like the infamous ATM for kids, it leaves money unseen and mysterious, said author Neale Godfrey, an expert in family finances who helped Intuit build Kids & Money. Plus, she said, smashing the piglet could be traumatic. (However, I remain attached to mine, which safely kept the pennies charged by Aunt Gertrude for sewing lessons.)

The engaging KidsZone portion of the Kids &l Money Web site features big, colorful buttons that match the cash envelopes and track what's earned, saved, or spent. It's cool that the division of savings discourages instant gratification, while My Sharing encourages charitable contributions. Built-in e-mail and My Wants wish lists are likely to please kids. There are games featuring Reggie the Register too, but younger children will need some guidance.

Quicken Kids & Money can't inoculate kids against TV commercials. Nor will it guarantee that its pricey $99 charge will wean junior Suze Ormans or Warren Buffetts over time. Yet this seems like a solid service for families willing to commit to it. Now what's needed are money-management tools for adolescents and college-age adults, who are prone to shopping sprees and credit card pitches. Intuit has no immediate plans to build similar services for older children and teens, although that could happen in coming years.