There’s more troubling news out of the Facebook camp this week. A lot of people are frustrated by changes to the user interface. On that point, it’s easy to side with Facebook. We are constantly working to improve Hschooler.net, and sometimes that involves change to how people use the service. I’m guessing that, over time, most Facebook users will come to appreciate the improvements that the company has made.

The scary issues, however, deal with privacy. Dave Winner has written a piece called “Facebook is scaring me,” which reports that Facebook is tracking and sharing what sites you visit, even if you don’t authorize them to do so. His recommendation is to make sure you log out of Facebook so your movements around the Internet won’t be tracked. However, Nik Cubrilovic responds by saying logging out isn’t enough. He provides a lot of technical detail (and some language I don’t appreciate) in his post “Logging out of Facebook isn’t enough.” He reports that Facebook continues to track what is done on a computer and associate those activities to a Facebook user, even after they’ve logged out of Facebook. He makes the point that this is scary especially if you log into Facebook from a public computer (e.g. at a library, hotel, or airport).

Needless to say, at Hschooler.net, we take privacy very seriously. We recognize that, even though Facebook and other secular sites present a lot of value, they also are operating in a post-privacy world* that scares us, especially as Christian parents trying to raise our kids in a safe environment. That’s why we’ve created Hschooler.net. I know that we will make mistakes. We’ll introduce “improvements” that you don’t appreciate. When we do that, please let us know. Lord willing, we hope to never make a mistake that violates your privacy. If you ever believe that we have, please contact me directly at russ.mcguire@gmail.com. We will address it immediately.

* Last year, Helen A. S. Popkin wrote a good summary of the situation at msnbc.com. She included a couple of quotes to give a sense of this post-privacy world:

Sun CEO Scott McNealy from 1999: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from 2010: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.”

This morning we issued a press release announcing a partnership with Midwest Parent Educators.

What we’ve done is create a private social network for MPE’s members inside of Hschooler.net. When their members log in to Hschooler, they see a dashboard that is styled to match MPE’s website. They are automatically added to a couple of MPE Groups, and on their MPE dashboard, they see the most recent activity in these Groups, upcoming calendar events for these Groups, and prayer requests for these Groups. They also see a newsfeed that is relevant to MPE members. The two MPE Groups are private, meaning that only MPE members can see them. The organization can create additional Groups that are private to MPE members and can set them up so that all MPE members can post to them, or only MPE staff. The MPE staff also has a set of tools for managing the organization, including managing the membership, managing groups, managing the dashboard, and seeing usage reports to know what’s working and what’s not.

What does this mean for you?

Well, if you’re an Hschooler.net member, you’ll likely start seeing a bunch of new members on Hschooler. Please give them a warm welcome. MPE members not only have access to the organization’s private social network space and groups, but also to the rest of Hschooler. MPE has over a thousand member families, all of whom will be receiving an e-mail with their login information. For any that are already Hschooler.net members, they simply associate their existing Hschooler account with the account MPE created for them and they’re good to go.

If you are part of the leadership of an organization and you think this is exactly what your membership needs, drop me a note at russ.mcguire@gmail.com. We believe that there’s tremendous value in social networking - enabling your members to stay connected with each other all the time, making it easy for members to find information, and keeping your organization relevant and top of mind for your members throughout the year. Working with Hschooler.net allows you to leverage the rich set of features we’ve created for our members without any software development on your part, lets your members join in the great conversations already happening on Hschooler, and avoids the concerns with privacy and content that you would have with pointing your members to one of the secular social networks.

See you soon on Hschooler!

We’ve just completed some significant development for Hschooler. Much of the effort has been focused on some exciting new capabilities that we aren’t yet ready to announce, but that we expect will make Hschooler.net an attractive destination for many new members. Stay tuned!

However, one really exciting capability that is now apparent is that you can have more than one dashboard!

In fact, we’ve created three new dashboards for everyone: Bible Dashboard, Groups Dashboard, and Family Dashboard. You can get to these by putting your mouse over the “Home” icon in the menubar, and selecting each dashboard from the list that appears. You can also add your own dashboards (you can have up to 10) by selecting “Add Dashboard”.

An important benefit of having multiple dashboards is that you can now “skinny down” your main dashboard so that it loads faster. By spreading your favorite widgets around different dashboards, you can remove widgets from your main dashboard.

To learn more about multiple dashboards, check out the new tutorial here.

Enjoy!

Groups and Messaging are the two most popular features in Hschooler.net.

We’re in the midst of some significant new developments, but we thought we’d go ahead and roll out a few of the improvements that will be included in that next major release. These minor tweaks provide improved usability that you can start enjoying right now.

Specifically:

• When sending a message, the pull down list of your friends now shows their icon as well as their name. That way, if you have two (or more) friends with the same name, you can pick the right one.
• When looking at a list of groups, those that you’re already a member of will say “Current Member” to remind you that you’re already in.
• When looking at a list of group topics, you can now choose “oldest” to see the list of comments in that topic from oldest to newest (this is how it’s always worked), or “newest” to see the list of comments from newest to oldest (this is a new capability).
• When you’re reading discussion comments, we’ve also added the navigation (previous, next) to the bottom of the list as well at the top so you don’t have to scroll back up just to go to the next page.

We hope these minor changes will enhance your Hschooler.net experience. Please let us know if you have any problems or ideas for making it even better!

We have just issued a press release about our new Chat and Games features. You can read it here.

We continue to hope and pray that Hschooler.net can be a blessing to a growing number of Christian families as they prepare their children to positively interact with an increasingly connected society. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns about Hschooler.net.

We are pleased to announce the availability of several highly requested new features for Hschooler.net.

The most highly requested feature in Hschooler.net has been Chat. Chat is now available, although it has to be enabled by parents through a Family account. All Hschooler.net members should now see a bar running across the bottom of their screen. This is the Chat bar. It can be moved out of the way by clicking on the arrows on the left end of the bar. On the right end of the bar is an indicator of how many of your friends are online. Clicking on that will show your online friends. Once the parents in your Family account turn on Chat for you, you will be able to see friends that you are allowed to chat with, and then click on their names to open a chat session with them. Parents can watch a tutorial for how to manage Chat for their family members here. Everyone can watch a tutorial on how to use Chat here. We hope you enjoy Chatting with your friends on Hschooler. We’d love to hear your feedback.

The second highly requested feature we’ve added is educational games. We’ve worked with Arcademic Skill Builders to make it easy to launch educational games from within Hschooler.net. Since all the parents that we talk to want to have control over whether their kids are playing games (even educational ones), this feature is another one that must be enabled by parents before it is available to members. Once enabled, Games is available from the Tools menu and a Featured Game widget can be added to your Dashboard. You can watch a tutorial on how to use the Games feature here.

We’ve also created new widgets that you can add to your Dashboard that provide Weather updates (from AccuWeather.com) and Sports Scores (from ESPN.com). The Sports Scores widget must first be enabled by parents. If you need help adding widgets to your dashboard, you can watch a tutorial here.

As always, we welcome your feedback on these new features or any aspect of the Hschooler.net service. You can send us feedback through the site, or by emailing russ.mcguire@gmail.com.

In May, we will introduce two significant changes to Hschooler.net family accounts:

• We will be launching the long-awaited “chat” capability within Hschooler.net
• We will be increasing the price of Family Accounts from $5 per year to $10 per year

Chat

The Chat capability will allow Hschooler.net members to instantly message back and forth with their friends within Hschooler.net. This has been the most requested feature for Hschooler.net since launching the service, however, we recognize Chat is an area of particular concern to parents. We have invested significant development resources into implementing controls so that Hschooler.net members can only chat with other members within the boundaries set by both sets of parents.

For example, let’s say that Mike, Joe, and Sally are all friends within Hschooler.net. In fact, Joe and Sally are brother and sister. Mike’s parents have indicated that Joe is a Trusted Friend, but Sally is just a Friend. Joe and Sally’s parents have both indicated that Mike is just a Friend.

If Mike’s parents say that he can Chat with Trusted Friends and Family Members, and if Joe and Sally’s parents say that Joe can Chat with Friends, but Sally can only Chat with Trusted Friends and Family Members, then:

• Mike and Joe can Chat
• Joe and Sally can Chat
• Mike and Sally can not Chat

Even if Sally’s parents changed her settings so that she could Chat with Friends, then she and Mike still couldn’t Chat, because Mike can only Chat with Trusted Friends.

Additionally, every Chat Session will be recorded and available for review by parents at any time. Parents can even view the transcript of currently active Chat Sessions.

Because parents must enable Chat and set the usage boundaries for their family members, Chat will only be available to Hschooler.net members who are part of a Family account.

Price Increase
To reflect the increasing value of Family Accounts, we are increasing the annual price for Family Accounts to $10 per year for new Family Account upgrades.

Any accounts that upgrade to a Family Account prior to the price increase will be locked in at the $5 per year price for as long as the Family Account is kept active.

Therefore, if you’d like to enjoy all of the current and future benefits of Family Account status (including Chat), we strongly recommend upgrading before the end of April.

This morning I gave a talk on “Raising Digital Natives Without Cannibalizing Your Faith” at the MPE Conference.

You can download the presentation by clicking here.

This coming weekend, Hschooler.net will have a large (for us) presence at the Midwest Parent Educators conference at the KCI Expo Center.

We will be exhibiting in booth 1108 from 9am to 6pm on Friday, April 8 and 8am to 5pm on Saturday, April 9. This year, we’re adding a fun-and-games element to the conference experience, so be sure to stop by and say hi.

I will be presenting a workshop on Friday morning (10:45 - 11:45) on “Raising Digital Natives Without Cannibalizing Your Faith.” I’ll be posting my slides from that workshop here next weekend.

We hope you have a chance to stop by during the conference and say hi. It’s great to connect with folks in the “real world.”

At approximately 6:45am CST this morning, due to an administrator error, the Hschooler.net database failed, causing the entire system to be inoperable. We immediately recognized the mistake and implications and initiated a system restore from our daily system backup. The system restore completed in approximately 5 minutes, so our total downtime was less than 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, our daily backup was taken shortly after 7pm last night, so any activity in the system (e-mails, group comments, status updates, photo uploads, etc.) between 7pm CST March 10, 2011 and 7am CST March 11, 2011 was lost. We apologize for this failure and earnestly ask your forgiveness for any inconvenience or pain this may have caused.

Romans 8:28 tell us that “…we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” (ESV)

We don’t know, but perhaps yesterday evening some of our members sent messages or posted comments that were ungracious, and perhaps, by the grace of God, this outage will enable those members to reconsider their words and actions. We do know that this outage has served as a healthy (good) wake up call to us at Hschooler.net.

Although this has been our first significant unplanned outage in the system since launching Hschooler.net in 2009, it is still a humbling experience. The protections we have in place have minimized the risk of this type of problem, and the systems we have put in place enabled us to quickly recover with relatively minimal impact. However, as we continue to grow, the need we’ve long recognized for a more resiliant infrastructure will increase in importance and urgency. The outage this morning is a reminder of that need.

If you know any homeschooled students who have a passion and proven ability in the area of Linux system administration and who would be interested in an Hschooler.net internship, please send me a note at russ.mcguire@gmail.com.

Thank you for your continued support and your grace and patience with your humbled servants at Hschooler.net.