Andy Mitchell

Glaxstar have officially announced TGW, a Firefox plugin that allows parents to control what their children do online, and to extend those capabilities as the child gets older.

Sam’s post can be found at Glaxstar launches child friendly browser plugin and Om’s at Building a Safer Web with GBrowser.

The Glaxstar plugin restricts Firefox, and allows parents to remotely moderate their child’s requests to view a page. In addition, it has global trust lists, and a mini social network of its own, that allows a parent to share their child’s sites with other parents.

Meanwhile, Paul over at Segala is building Content Labels, a mechanism for a site to be validated and given a certificate that reveals who it is suitable for. The site itself reveals this certificate. This is both an interesting and scaleable approach.

Now, what’s the point?
Glaxstar is advancing an immature market, and will surely gain market share. However, by and large the market is still primitive. It’s “good sites” and “bad sites”, black and white. Last time I checked, the Web was grey (go to Google and search ‘beaver’… you may find a cute river-dwelling mammal with a passion for construction… or something equally furry but a little more, erm, well, you’d be surprised to find one building dams).

These extensions should allow restricted access to sites; depending on the profile of the user. This is something that has been tried before, but always on a site by site basis: a policy that is confusing, hard work and destined to not scale (so I’ve got a suitability profile at Google, but what about at BBC News?).

How?
The ’standard’ would be built around two concepts, ‘content’ and ‘actions’.

• ‘Content’ would be in manageable chunks, think blog posts in a page. The extension would define the content suitable for the current user, and the site would make it trivial for the extension to omit unsuitable chunks of content from the page.
• ‘Actions’ would be things like ‘Add a friend’ or ‘Post a message’. This is potentially hazardous to a child’s safety. The extension would automatically inhibit the action, and send it to the parent to be moderated. If the parent approves, the action is completed.
  In both cases, all the sites would be doing is added a little bit of markup, or perhaps special URLs, that the extension can interact with.

Yeah, but that sounds like work. Why would my site bother?
Largely it comes down to this, parents are getting more savvy. You can either be blocked, or you can participate.
More subtley…

• Your site might largely target older teens, and therefore be deemed unsuitable for a younger child. But what if you want some parts of your site to appeal to younger children (and their parent’s wallet)? It’s much less work to just maintain one site, but let it be ‘trimmed’ by this extension to make it safe for the younger audience.
• Similarly, you no longer have to design, implement, test (and use to confuse) your own parential child locks at your site.
• It is excellent PR. You are seen to be participating in being child safe.
• As Glaxstar is already doing, you can be ‘rewarded’ for participation by inclusion in the white lists. So, parent Jon whitelists your site, and parents Phil, Marie & Jane see your site and start using it. It’s natural promotion.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Vision.