| Amazon, YouTube and Facebook have a product for you, kiddo |
| Amazon, YouTube and Facebook had a message for parents this week. We hear your complaints. And we'll address (some of them.) |
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| Kids want to watch hours of YouTube, but many parents feel conflicted about non-kid friendly videos showing up in their feeds. |
| They also have an issue with the Amazon Echo speaker and the Alexa personal assistant. Young ones often turn to it for poop jokes or listening to music with racy lyrics. Also not cool. |
| And what youngster doesn't want to join a social network, which often have a minimum age requirement of 13? |
| So this week Amazon released a kid-friendly edition of its entry level Dot speaker, while YouTube introduced changes to its stand-alone YouTube Kids app to make it less scary to parents. And Facebook said it's tweaking some of its controls on the Messenger for Kids app for parents to set timers on their usage. |
| Let's begin with YouTube and the dichotomy that is the terms of service calling for hands-off from eyes that are younger than 13. Try telling that to the million youngsters who watch YouTube anyway, while their parents play whack-a-mole, trying to keep their kids away from adult, exploitive, violent and scary content. |
| And consider that the second most popular channel on YouTube is Ryan Toy's Review, hosted by a 6-year-old kid who revels in the latest toys. |
| The answer for YouTube was a standalone app, launched in 2015, for smartphones and tablets, offering a safer place, parents thought, for kids. That was all well and good, until non-kid friendly videos started falling through the cracks. |
| The problem with the app was that it relied on the same computer algorithm of the main app, and computers just aren't as good at curating content. |
| So this week YouTube finally did the right thing, offering new tools in an update to turn the free app into a curated experience, with content from Sesame Street, Kidzbop, PBS Kids and others, and taking away the ability for kids to bring in other content. |
| That's the good news. The bad is that the app, despite what YouTube says, is targeted to 2-5 year olds. There's just no way any kid over the age of say, 8, is going to be satisfied living in a walled garden of hand-picked videos. YouTube needs to dramatically up the content, and bring in stuff older kids would actually watch. |
| But it's a great band-aid for an embarrassing problem. |
| For Amazon, a kid-friendly Dot is just another feature to sell another product, this one priced $30 more than the adult version. |
| The Echo Dot Kids Edition is billed as a DJ, comedian and storyteller by Amazon, one that can play (family friendly) music, read stories and tell jokes. Much of this comes in the guise of a new subscription service, free for the first year, called FreeTime, which also includes access to 300 audiobooks for kids. |
| The new Sleep Mode feature on Facebook Messenger for Kids set limits for usage and even receiving notifications. |
| The moves are a good step in the right direction by tech companies that either screw up (in the case of the early YouTube Kids app) are self-serving (that's how critics see Facebook's Messenger for kids, as just another way of hooking young ones early into the social network) or indifferent (where's Apple with young kids?) |
| In other tech news this week |
| Self-destructing Gmails: In the first major update to the Gmail e-mail program since 2011, Google introduced several new features, including one that lets you put a time element to the life of an email and demand two-factor authentication before the recipient can read it. |
| Spotify adds more free music. In a bid to keep people off rival Apple Music and sell more of its own subscriptions, Spotify upped the free content, letting anyone access 15 curated on-demand playlists, with the ability to pick and play any track off those playlists in any order, which you couldn't do under the prior free plan. And if you don't like the choices? Subscribe for $10 monthly. |
| Amazon did a lot this week. First, the e-tailer said it would now start offering trunk deliveries, with a lot of caveats. It will come to your vehicle if you're not parked in a structure, and have a recent GM or Volvo car. It's the latest update to the Key service, which lets Amazon reps drop packages in your home. Then it quietly tacked on an additional $20 fee yearly for using the Prime expedited shipping and entertainment service, bringing the total for $119 yearly. No, you can't get packages delivered to your trunk unless you're a Prime member. |
| This week's Talking Tech podcasts |
| Can SmugMug revive Flickr? SmugMug, the photo sharing site, is acquiring the long dormant photo enthusiast site Flickr from Yahoo. We lay out the challenges for bringing Flickr back from the nearly dead. |
| How to get great Prom photos. We interview high school seniors about their best tips and tricks for getting great prom photos, |
| Amazon can open your trunk to deliver packages. The latest from Amazon: a new program to deliver packages direct to your car trunk--without you even being there. Elizabeth Weise from USA TODAY joins us to tell all about it. |
| YouTube says the machines are working: YouTube says its use of machines to get rid of "violative" content is working--but it still has a long ways to go to clean up its act, we note. |
| Meet Chewable Structures' Theresa Chong. The former civil engineer has taken her love of science to food, building edible replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Family Guy house and more for her Chewable Structures YouTube channel. She tells us how she did it. |
| Inside Google's radical Gmail revamp. We weigh in on the new Gmail features. |
| How much would you pay for Amazon Prime? We look at the pros and cons, and wonder just how high it will be by 2023 on Talking Tech. |
| Thanks for visiting with us again for our take on the week's tech news. Have you subscribed to the newsletter? Click this link to get it delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Be sure to check out the daily #TalkingTech podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to podcasts. |
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