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KidZui Starts Youth Off Early on Social NetworkingOctober 13th, 2008 at 3:30 pmSource:TechCrunch Last year we ran a post introducing the idea of Twitter as a conduit for fiction when we wrote about Twittories, a series of crowdsourced stories comprised of 140 Twitter messages from up to 140 different people. Now it seems that some individual authors are exploring using Twitter as an alternative to the traditional novel. Professional author and freelance writer Nikki Katz has launched her own story called MyLifeIn140 - the tale of a “sixteen-year-old fictional character who learns that she can change her world around her, all by editing photos in her Yearbook room.”Source:TechCrunch Today, Wix announced that it raised a $3.5 million series B round From Mangrove Capital Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. The Israeli startup offers a Web-based Flash editor for making artful widgets and Websites, but without losing any SEO juice. (I’ve embedded two examples below). The service has been showing some healthy growth since it launched in public beta last June. Co-CEO Allon Bloch tells me that Wix just crossed the 200,000-user mark, and is adding between 2,000 and 3,000 a day. These users are creating 2,000 new Web pages and widgets every day (the split is about 75/25 in favor of full-blown Web pages on MySpace and elsewhere). In September, says Bloch, Wix content across the Web generated 20 million pageviews, up from 13 million in August. Source:TechCrunch KidZui, the kid-friendly web browser that debuted last March as a subscription service but switched over to a freemium model just a few months later, has introduced a suite of social networking features designed for kids aged 3-12. There are obvious safety concerns when developing a product that helps kids communicate with others online, especially since it’s nearly impossible to ensure that their online buddies are indeed kids with benign intentions themselves. So, unlike Facebook - which lets its users share extensive personal details, write on each others’ walls, and send free-form messages - KidZui doesn’t enable explicit forms of communication at all. |
