Togetherville – Facebook For Kids, Gets New Communities Feature
Togetherville is a social network, much like Facebook, but targeting a somewhat different audience, let’s say. It was made for kids, ten years old and even younger and the site has recently announced that it has launched a feature called “School Communities”. The team behind the social network seems to want to “give kids a voice” regarding the way their schools work. Aside from that, Togetherville is also changing the way children can connect with their friends. This action was made easier. Previously, for a kid to friend someone, the two sets of parents would have to be friends on Facebook. There’s no point in explaining why this type of friending was annoying for both children and their parents.
Seeing as Togetherville kind of relies on Facebook, then why not just let the kids connect through Facebook, anyway? Well, for starters the world’s largest social network has a “13 years old and over” requirement upon signup. Moreover, it’s not specifically designed for kids, like Togetherville, so most young members might have a better time on the latter, anyway. Parents don’t have a lot to complain about either. Reportedly, Togetherville represents a safer, more secure environments and it allows parents to control who their children are talking to. Parents will also get to approve the friends of their kids or connect with other kids’ parents by using Facebook’s social graph. A new “Schools” feature will now make friending easier as well. When you set up an account for your child, enter his name and the school’s name and you’ll get to see a list of potential friends. Assuming they want to, your child may friend any of them, but with a parent’s approval.
Adding “schools” to the mix, you’ll get a pretty interesting result. But another feature, called communities enables all of the adults will be able to talk to eachother regarding their young one’s schools on the institution’s community page. Kids will get to have a say in this as well, but in a somewhat controlled manner. Occasionally, the site will send out mass polls to all users with questions like “What’s your favorite subject and why?” and kids will get to speak their minds. All of their answers will appear in the feeds of their friends and the parent will be asked if it’s ok to publish the response on the community page of the child’s school. Permission is also required for the response to be published as a part of anonymous data which is gathered across the entire social network.
Why is this good? It’s simple. Kids are sometimes not taken very seriously, especially if they complain about something. If more than one child speaks his/her mind about a certain problem the school is facing, then parents will figure out that there really might be an issue there, and ask for a solution. Togetherville CEO Mandeep Dhillion also mentioned that the community feature will become available for uses beyond schools, such as soccer teams.11
