Net Nanny Social

With a history going back to 1996, Net Nanny is among the best-known names in parental control software. The product has seen some significant changes over the years, but it has remained a PC-centered application, not a Web-based multi-device system like some of its competitors. Until now, that is. With the release of Net Nanny Social, the company has taken a first step into cloud-based social media tracking. It definitely is just a first step; the product needs some work.

Your $19.95 yearly subscription lets you track social media activity for any number of children, which is nice. ZoneAlarm SocialGuard will track five children, and a free MinorMonitor account tracks just one.

Setting up your account is simple; just supply an email address and mobile number, and define a password for the account. The whole system is Web-based, so you can log in from wherever you are.

Setting Up a Child Profile
Once you've entered your child's name and email address, Net Nanny gets busy searching for social media accounts associated with that address. It specifically searches for accounts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Flickr, Pinterest, Photobucket, Pandora, Orkut, and MySpace. If you already know your child's profile URL for any of the supported social media sites, you can just fill it in directly. ZoneAlarm SocialGuard and MinorMonitor track only Facebook. uKnowKids aggregates tracking of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, but adds monitoring of smartphone calls and texts.

As the biggest social network, Facebook gets special attention. If you know your child's Facebook password, you can install the Net Nanny app; if you don't, you can send an automated email asking the child to install the app. As a less-great alternative, as long as you and your child are Facebook friends Net Nanny can monitor activity by going through your Facebook account.

SafetyWeb tracks down social media accounts (over 60 sites) using all email addresses that the child uses. Because it specifically looks for public information, SafetyWeb doesn't require installation of any apps. Net Nanny only lets you record a single email address. For a child who uses multiple addresses, you'll have to create multiple child profiles, and you won't get the benefit of having all social media activity aggregated in a single timeline.

Initially Net Nanny can only retrieve public information for accounts found by searching on the child's email address. . For LinkedIn and a few others, Net Nanny offers an app that will get deeper information, if you can convince your child to install it.

Online Dashboard
After you've set up a profile for each child and given Net Nanny time to locate all social media accounts, you'll view social media information through the product's online dashboard. The overview page displays statistics showing the number of profiles found, number of recent activities, and number recent "Alerts"?potentially risky activities. Initially it just shows today's data, but you can choose to see the previous week, month, or six months.

The purpose of the the "Sentiment" dial below these stats isn't immediately clear, and to add to the confusion it works on a different time scale. You can set to consider today, the last five days, the last one, three, six, or twelve months, or all activity. According to my Net Nanny contacts, a high number of alerts will send the dial swinging toward the yellow or red, as will "other events that might raise concern such as many people un-friending a child."

Unfortunately, you can't dig in to view the reason for a low Sentiment rating. The reputation dial used by SocialShield looks much like Net Nanny's Sentiment dial, but SocialShield makes it easy to see the reason for a low reputation rating.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/vcRbSvTH-NM/0,2817,2418570,00.asp

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