This tweet  and subsequent twitter conversation made me think about a story of my son and the early days of social networking sites for kids.

This story happened when my son was about 8 or 9, and now he’s  19. His sister, who is 2 and a half years older than him, used to frequent a site named girlz dot com (which is now a porn site!!). She and her cousins (I think, it may have been her step-sisters) would monopolize the computer with the girly website.

Kenny, the only boy relative at the time, hated the girly website. He proclaimed that it was not fair that there was a girlz dot com, and when it was finally his turn to play on the computer, he said loudly that he was going to boyz dot com. Boyz dot com has ALWAYS been a porn site. And the site was a pretty typical 90’s porn site, lots of rapid fire pop-ups with some very graphic stuff.

So Kenny loads up the site, and the girls are all right there, and they all start screaming when the porn site starts spewing its stuff all over the screen. Kenny was in a panic trying to close down windows. I think we turned off the monitor and sent everyone away.

It was actually pretty funny.

A new house rule was born that day: if you have never visited a URL, you must google it first to determine the content of the site.