Twudy: New Tween Microblogging Service
Twudy.com describes itself as a Twitter-style site that is aimed at providing a safe environment for teen girls to meet up and discuss the subjects they love. On the surface this certainly seems like a good idea, but sadly the site currently seems to fall far short of actually achieving such a lofty vision.
Instead Twudy currently stands as a fairly basic microblogging platform. Unlike twitter other peoples posts do not automatically appear on your home page, instead upon logging in users are confronted with their own wall posts and have to choose where to go from there.
There are several ways to navigate around the site:
- Users can choose to check out all the recent public posts made on the network
- Groups can be used (and set up) to discuss certain topics
- People can follow each other for easy viewing of posts
- The site wide search function can be used to find text and tags in posts
When making a new post users are limited to 160 characters, but adding a video or image to the update doesn’t use up any of the text limit. Members of the site can like or dislike posts and users can choose to share status updates through pretty much every kind of web based social promotion system in existence (Digg, Facebook, Google Buzz, Twitter, etc).
Whilst it claims to be a service aimed at teenage girls, Twudy currently has no safe guards in place to make sure that only teen girls are using it. The site did just launch two weeks ago, so it may be the case that they are beta-testing their software instead of worrying about the specifics of a proposed business model. However, as things stand anyone who wants to can become a member of Twudy, without having to give any information about their age or gender in order to do so.
The idea of an enclosed web environment where teens can meet up safely without exposing too much information about themselves is a pretty good one. Twudy though seems more like a site aimed at being a one stop tool for broadcasting messages across other social networking sites, as opposed to being its own tween girl based blogosphere.
It will be interesting to see how Twudy develops. As a media tool it has a lot of potential, but whether or not it will be successful at becoming an online teen haven remains to be seen.
That would be my concern, as the father of a ten-year-old– the safeguards. We will hold out as long as possible with FaceBook and Twitter. If this does not provide safeguards, why not just let them go on Twitter?