Infinite Family connects mentors anywhere in the world with South African teens in need of adult guidance, advice and support. These "net buddies" connect via weekly video conferences.

Mentors sign up for at least a half-hour chat every week for a year. Additional online resources include interactive forums, live chat, an online game area and a "web link pod," where a mentor and net buddy can do homework and explore the web together. The site also has an "SOS" button kids can use when they are having and emergency and need to talk. 400 volunteers and members of the board have helped connect around 300 teens, called with 200 mentors so far.

Any member of the EZ Net can become friends with any other member.

The need for an adult presence is not just practical, but elemental. As Stokes told CNN, who made her their first CNN Hero of 2011:

"If none of the adults you care about has ever lived past 35, then why would you think you can? Why would you stay in school; why would you learn skills?"

Anyone can sign up to be a mentor, though any applicant is thoroughly vetted and trained.

In addition to this example of the point of adulthood and guidance to help the kids succeed in their lives, the weekly talks build communications, English and technical skills that will help them as they grow up. Infinite Family has build five computer labs across South Africa that it operates for its net buddies.

You already know what the iPad can do: apps, games, eBooks (or rather, iBooks), media and so on. But what can it do for you? How does it fit in with your life? This anecdotal review may help you to answer that question:

A Day in the Life of an iPad

The morning after the iPad's arrival - incidentally Easter Sunday here in the U.S. - I spent the first half hour of my day with the iPad in one hand and a baby bottle in the other. While the little one ate, I read the New York Times. For free. Well, at least some of it. Although a full-featured paid application is on its way, the "Editor's Choice" app available now is a great way to hit the highlights from the paper's top sections. The iPad's weight here was a bit of an issue - 1.5 pounds may not seem like a lot, but holding it aloft away from baby's grabby fingers was a bit tricky, especially because, unlike an actual, dull grey-colored newspaper, the iPad's glowing screen and colorful images is an invite to touch that can't be denied.

Morning Newspaper

Later, in the car to the family gathering, I finished reading the articles I missed in the NYT's offline mode. I have the Wi-Fi version of the iPad, so Internet access is limited. But the articles were still available, cached to the device for just this situation. I then passed the time with a game of iMahjong. Like most iPad games, Internet isn't needed to play.

Upon arrival at our destination - the sister-in-law's house where extended family would meet, dine and relax, I mistakenly imagined that the only two people who would be interested in my latest purchase were the teenage nephews, already iPod Touch owners and avid gamers. Although they were immediately engrossed, to be sure, they weren't the only ones who would spend time with this new device, as I would later find out.

Game-Playing Device

The first question from the oldest nephew: "I heard iPad apps are a lot more expensive than those for the iPod Touch - is that true?" Unfortunately, it is. For whatever reason, iPad developers have mistakenly assumed that a bigger screen means a bigger price tag. This is not how the minds of penny-pinching, allowance-earning tweens and teens think, though. And although they may not be the target market per se, their moms and dads are. A game priced too high will simply be ignored - or worse, torrented, the nephews tell me. There are plenty of iPhone apps on torrent sites, I'm being told - referring to the online stores of cracked, hacked and otherwise ill-acquired software programs, movies, TV shows, music and media made available for download for those running free torrenting client applications on their computers. iPad apps will soon appear here, too. Should developers be worried about this black market for their super-sized creations? Yes, possibly. Unlike the more moderately priced iPhone apps, iPad apps can be much more expensive. And if their prices extend beyond the comfort levels of today's consumers, you can be sure the apps will leak out on backchannels such as these.

With pricing in mind, I tell the nephews they could download anything they wanted so long as it was free. And so they set forth upon their iPad adventure. After playing a number of games, including the Guitar Hero-like "Tap Tap Radiation," a tilted maze in "Labyrinth Lite," the role-playing game "Aurora Feint 3," some sort of shoot-em-up called "EliminatePro," and several others, my iPad was soon filled with a screen of apps I knew I'd never touch but would be regularly accessed time and again at subsequent family functions.

Child's Plaything

Once the older nephews had their fill, it was the 5-year-old's turn. With adult supervision, he enjoyed Disney's interactive book app, Toy Story and created works of art fingerpaint-style via Doodle Buddy. (He got a real kick out of the sound effects that accompanied the paste-in clip art in the program, too. Animal sounds, apparently, are incredibly funny).

We mistakenly thought that the Marvel comics book application would also be a fun diversion for this second-youngest of the family. (Don't laugh - comic book aficionados we are not.) But after a second-page reference to "Girls Gone Wild" in the free Spiderman comic and a third-page image of our favorite superhero shouting "Shut the @#*% up!," we realized that, at some point, comics must have grown up. These one-time children's past-times are now adult graphic novels. Oops. App closed. Back to doodling.

Grandma's Photo Album

Later, with bellies stuffed by Easter ham and dessert, the iPad found its way to the baby's grandmother. One guess what she looked at? Yes, baby pictures. "Can you email me some of those later?" Of course I could, but not later, now. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, photos (a max of 5 at a time) can be sent directly from the iPad's built-in Photos application.

...And Everything Else

Now hours had gone by, and the iPad was still in circulation. With nothing else to do, I opened a wrinkled, balled-up magazine I had thrown into my bag precisely for this reason. I didn't expect to get much iPad-time myself, I just didn't realize that it would literally never return to me. As one person played on the iPad - reading, watching a video, playing a game, etc. - others relaxed with TV, a book of Sodoku puzzles, toys, and (gasp!) even printed newspapers.

On the iPad, someone was playing cards. Then someone was watching Netflix. Grandma is showing great-grandma more photos. Look! The baby is doodling! Now someone is trying an iPhone app on the iPad. (Verdict? Not a good experience. Forget the fact that the iPad runs all the iPhone apps - they look awful. Don't bother.) Interestingly enough, one "app" that was never launched was Safari, the iPad's built-in web browser.

By nightfall, the iPad had been in rotation for hours upon hours and still had nearly 40% battery remaining. The battery longevity claims (10 hours+) are true, it seems.

A Family Computer

Debates about the iPad's worth as an eReader, aside, fears that it will somehow transform us from a population of content creators to passive consumers (most of us already are just that), hopeful claims from big media that it's the "future of publishing" - I'd argue that none of these are reasons to buy or not to buy an iPad.

Simply put: the iPad is the first real family computer. No longer is computing an isolated experience with one person staring at one screen, fingers clacking away on the keyboard while the rest of the family does something else. The iPad was shared between brothers, giggled over by children, and downright snuggled up with by parent and child. It was no more isolating an experience than someone reading the paper in the next chair over. It was easily just another everyday object. And that may be its biggest selling point yet: the iPad hides away the technology, and makes content king. And at the end of the day, that's not really such a bad thing.

Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner with ReadWriteWeb.

Case in point: I lost count of the number of times I rebuffed my daughter while drawing this cartoon.

More Noise to Signal.

Is Facebook after Grandma and Grandpa now that they have mom and dad? You bet.

You then have the option of inviting more members to join the group. In Step 2, there are boxes provided to enter in the names of your family members already on Facebook. If you need more boxes, just click the green plus sign below. Finally, and likely the reason why Facebook created these groups in the first place, there is an option to invite other people in your family to join Facebook.

You can type in email addresses by hand or import them from your email address book. (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Apple Mail, and many others are supported.)

The group, once created, looks like any other Facebook group with a Member List, Discussion Board, Wall, Events Section, etc. However, there's a big difference between this group and others you'll find on Facebook. It's a completely private group, not visible to anyone else.

Facebook explains this in the "Group Type" box:

This is a secret group. It will not show up in your profile, and only admins can invite members.

In other words, you can post away in here without worries that your online friends will see your activity. The only exception to this, unfortunately, is with the events. When you go to create an event within the group, it's shared either with your local network (in my case that's Tampa Bay) or all of Facebook. The supposedly "secret" group is listed as the host of the event. So much for privacy. It would have been nice to use this feature to track family gatherings, but there's no need to broadcast every anniversary and family reunion to the entire social network that is Facebook.

Sadly, this Events section is yet another example of how Facebook forces public sharing on you even while pretending they're offering you a completely private venue.

Still, assuming you have enough family members willing to join Facebook - and based on these latest statistics, it's likely that you do - this new feature could end up being a great place to communicate and share content with your family. In fact, we expect that this single feature may even lead to an explosion of Facebook sign-ups from Grandmas and Grandpas everywhere. It might even attract some of the younger kids away from MySpace so they can hang out with the family on Facebook. On second thought, maybe not. it might just make Facebook look even more like that uncool place online where all those grownups hang out.

Thanks to AllFacebook for discovering this new feature!

It's still up for debate how much personal information you should share with others on your Facebook profile. Some people would argue that the time for us to hide behind our masks is over. If we're professional, good employees at work and good sons and daughters at home, it shouldn't matter so much if a friend tags us in a photo which shows us tipping back beers at the weekend party. The fact is, everyone has a personal life and it shouldn't matter who sees it.

Others would say that those are precisely the sorts of photos that make it dangerous to use online social networks like Facebook for both personal and business networking. "Don't friend the boss," they would argue. It's just too risky.

Sharing Some Things, Not Others

The issue isn't really that black and white, though. You may feel it's OK for your colleagues to see some of your Facebook photos (like those from the conference you attended), but not others (like those from the party). You also may be a little uncomfortable with the boss reading your wall posts, especially if your friends have an odd sense of humor at times.

If you're not ready to expose everything about you to anyone who asks to be your online friend, it's time you learned how to use Facebook's friend lists.

A little over a year ago, Facebook launched a new feature called "Friend Lists." With lists, you can create groups of friends on Facebook, separating work from family and close friends. It's simple to use, but it's definitely an underutilized feature. In fact, most of the people who spend their days "Facebooking," never seem to take the time to worry about who's seeing what...until it's too late.

But now, as more older generations are going online and joining social networks, the "Should I Friend Mom/Dad/Boss?" issue is becoming more prevalent than ever.

How To Use Friend Lists

To get started with Facebook Lists, you first need to build one. You can do this from your Friends page. (Click "Friends" in the blue bar at the top). On the left side of the page, click the button "Make a New List." Give it a title.

Now you'll have the option to add your friends to the list. You can either start typing in names one by one or click on "Select Multiple Friends" to add several people to the list all at once. (To add people, just click on their photos.) When you're finished, click the "Save List" button at the bottom.

Once you have some lists created, it's time to figure out who gets to see what. To edit your privacy settings, go to "Settings" at the top-right of the screen next to the search box. When you hover your mouse over the link, you'll see a menu appear; click "Privacy Settings"on this menu. On the following page, click "Profile," the top choice in the list of options.

On the profile privacy page, you have the option of customizing exactly who gets to see what. You can modify the following areas: Profile, Basic Info, Personal Info, Status Updates, Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, Friends, Wall Posts, Education Info, and Work Info. If you're unsure of what any of those things are, click the "?" next to the item to read a definition.

Using the drop-down boxes, you can customize who gets to see your info: "Only Friends," "Friends of Friends," or "My Network of Friends." To lock down your profile to friends only, you could set all these to "only friends." But since you have now created specialized lists, you'll want to use these instead.

To do so, click the fourth option from the drop-down box: "Customize." From here, you can add lists of people who should NOT be able to see this part of your profile. For example, if you wanted to block a list of work colleagues or those in your family from seeing your status updates, you could do so here - just type the name of your list in the box "Except these people" and save your changes.

Note: you can also block certain people individually just by typing in their names, but given the ever-growing number of Facebook users, you're probably going to need a Friend List at some point. We recommend biting the bullet and creating your lists now instead of treating everyone as a one-off. 

After you've saved your changes, you're done. You'll have your privacy back without having to change the way you and your friends use Facebook. Of course, keep in mind that nothing is foolproof - determined hackers can gain access to your account as can anyone who guesses your password....so maybe you shouldn't use your dog's name.

When lists are finally in place, you can assign new friends to a list right when you're accepting their friend request - just look for the option "Add to Friend List" before you click "Accept."

It may seem like quite a bit of work to set up, but you'll thank yourself for doing this later...like every Monday morning when you go back to work after a great weekend...or the next time you need to borrow money from mom and dad. You get the idea. Better safe than sorry.

GroupSwim is an innovative company which has created an intelligent community building and collaboration SaaS solution. It was mentioned here on RWW previously as one of the finalists in the Enterprise 2.0 launch pad. GroupSwim aims to connect individuals and build knowledge utilising social based methodologies. Their method of working comes from four observations of  current offerings and methods of working:

So what does GroupSwim offer? Their solution has:

• A nice Web 2.0 interface
• An open architecture that allows it to grow, adapt and morph at will
• The benefit of leveraging community intelligence
• A robust enterprise grade architecture

How does it work?

Once a user creates an account, they can create multiple communities within their account. This has two benefits - it means a business can have different communities for different parts of the business, but it also means that an individual user, with one single sign on, can access all of the groups they are subscribed to. This is all nice but not unique, GroupSwim's main benefit comes from its semantic approach and its qualitative differentiation techniques which together improve functionality and user experience.

Semantic Approach

Content entered into a discussion is automatically analysed and tagged with keywords. This allows better classification, better searching and a more relevant and proactive customer experience to be offered to the user. Of course users can edit, change and add to the automatically generated tags but it speeds up the process no end. My experience with other collaborative platforms is that the search tends to be a little clunky - often giving poor results, Groupswim's semantic search improves the search and therefore overall usability of the service.

Qualitative Differentiation

GroupSwim keeps a running tally on both explicit and implicit rating of material. Explicit rating comes from user ratings as per other solutions, implicit rating comes from a host of automatically assessed criteria - how often an item is read, how many times it is on-forwarded, how long it remains open etc. In this way users get a true assessment of the quality of any piece of content. Groupswim have done a nice job of capturing the two streams of rating - together the overall rating gives an improved experience - this coupled with the semantic search really sped things up in my trial.

Conclusion

GroupSwim provides a compelling offering - I can see it providing real value for organisational community building both internally and externally. Check out their elevator pitch video below.