Angry Birds' Facebook Launch in Jakarta on Feb. 14

Angry Birds' Facebook Launch in Jakarta on Feb. 14 - Peter Vesterbacka is serious about standing out in the crowd. Cruising through an ocean of black business suits in a red hooded sweatshirt, this 42-year-old Finn turns heads with his appearance.

After all, it’s not the sort of look you would expect from someone who made Time Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People list last year. Vesterbacka is the chief marketing officer of Rovio, the Finnish mobile game developer behind “Angry Birds,” and proud owner of 17 “Angry Birds” sweatshirts, his favorite business attire.

“I’m wearing red for a reason,” Vesterbacka said during an appearance at Jakarta’s Founder Institute on Wednesday. “In marketing, it’s important to stand out.”

Rovio chief marketing officer Peter Vesterbacka speaking in Jakarta at the Founder Institute on Wednesday. (JG Photo/Lisa Siregar)

It’s an infallible trick; people come up to him and start talking about “Angry Birds,” the addictive mobile game that lets players slingshot a variety of birds at the antagonistic green pigs.

This simple concept is bringing Rovio big bucks. The game, released in 2009, costs 99 cents on Apple’s App Store and sits at more than 500 million downloads across all platforms since last year.

During his short visit to Jakarta, Vesterbacka announced that “Angry Birds” would come to Facebook on Valentine’s Day, in a bid to strive for 1 billion users. The worldwide launch will take place in Jakarta on Feb. 14 and will likely have a life-size game as part of the event.

“Angry Birds” will use Facebook to become even more social, letting players challenge their friends and share their best score.

For Vesterbacka, or “Mighty Eagle” in “Angry Bird” jargon, launching the Facebook app in Jakarta makes sense given Indonesians’ love for social media.

“It’s the Facebook capital of the world,” he said.

But Vesterbacka wants Indonesia to be more than just the launch place of a new app. Future versions of the game will also incorporate Indonesian cultural references like batik.

This won’t be the first time Rovio uses Asian cultural references. Last year, it featured Chinese moon cakes, a traditional dish during the mid-autumn festival, which was welcomed by users.

“It turns out that a lot of players never heard of them [Chinese moon cakes] before,” he said.

“Angry Birds” has come a long way since its App Store debut in December 2009. The game quickly reached 50 million downloads, a number that doubled in just three months thanks to the seasonal versions rolled out regularly.

Rovio had a quiet 2011 with only one release, “Angry Birds Rio,” a tie-in with the animated film “Rio.” Back in the head office, most of the time has been spent on expansion and working on a series of big launches planned for this year, with “Angry Birds” for Facebook just the first. The birds will catapult their way onto new merchandise such as clothes, toys and even cookies. “We are now the most copied brand in China,” Vesterbacka said with some pride.

There is even an unlicensed “Angry Birds” theme park in China where people can play a real-life version of the game. He takes unlicensed products as a good sign.

“It means we are more loved than Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty,” he said.

Disney is both a competitor and something of a role model for Rovio’s expansion. Vesterbacka said it was fascinating how Disney’s global success started with a black-and-white mouse cartoon, followed by more and more characters until the release of “Toy Story” in 1995 by Walt Disney Pictures.

Television is its other competitor in the race for people’s time and attention. Vesterback wants Rovio to become an entertainment giant with a billion fans worldwide.

“We focus on fans, not users or customers, because not all ‘Angry Birds’ lovers have actually played the game,” he said.

Vesterbacka emphasized that the company’s success didn’t happen overnight. “Angry Birds” is the company’s 52nd game and comes after tens of failed and less successful attempts since the company’s foundation in 2003, with only 12 developers. The only exception was “Bounce,” a game for Nokia handsets that enjoyed some popularity. Things began to change when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007.

“The iPhone and the App Store changed everything,” Vesterbacka said, acknowledging Rovio’s debt to Apple for solving developers distribution issues.

The idea of “Angry Birds” came from game designer Jaakko Iisalo. In early versions, it didn’t have any pigs and users struggled to understand the game, but they loved the birds.

Then the swine flu outbreak came and made headlines around the world. Rovio added some sneaky pigs who, according to the story, stole the birds’ eggs, thus making them angry. It took Rovio eight months to finish the first version of “Angry Birds” for Apple’s iOS mobile operating system.

Vesterbacka grew up a gamer and was enamored with anything digital. He dropped out of a marketing major at Finland’s University of Turku in 1989 to work for Hewlett-Packard. There he created Bazaar, a program that connects mobile operators encouraging collaboration on new mobile technologies.

In 2000, he founded Mobile Monday, or MoMo, an informal gathering for people working in Helsinki’s mobile industry. The event soon spread to Tokyo, Silicon Valley and 100 other cities worldwide later on. Vesterbacka also works with Startup Sauna, an accelerator in Helsinki, where he coaches and helps start-ups to make it into the industry.

Vesterbacka said Rovio was brimming with plans, including releasing a new game. But firstit is concentrating on integrating mobile games and entertainment.

“And we plan to add new ‘Angry Birds’ characters, and maybe name them,” Vesterbacka said.

At the moment, the game has around 12 characters, none with names beyond red bird, blue bird, yellow bird or black bird. Vesterbacka also said “Angry Birds” would soon be available on Xbox, PlayStation 3 and Nokia’s new handset, the Asha.

“As a growing company, you have to take advantage of every opportunity,” Vesterbacka said. And that is what Rovio is doing, one bird at a time. ( thejakartaglobe.com )

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Facebook, Google, others face charges in India

Facebook, Google, others face charges in India — For the first time, Indian prosecutors are taking Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other networking sites to court for refusing to remove material considered insulting to Indian leaders and major religious figures.

Government officials are upset about material insulting to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ruling Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi and major religious figures. Some illustrations have shown Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions and pigs running through Mecca, Islam's holiest city.

On Friday, the federal government told a New Delhi court that there was sufficient material to proceed against 21 social networking sites for offenses of "promoting enmity between classes and causing prejudice to national integration," according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

The cases, which PTI said name companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, represent a new risk of doing business in the nation of more than 1 billion people, which is looking to technology to boost its economy and standard of living. The dispute highlights India's difficulty in balancing the Internet culture of freewheeling discourse with its homegrown religious and political sensitivities.

Convictions could bring fines and up to five years' imprisonment, through prosecutors have named only the companies involved rather than any executives. Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar on Friday asked India's External Affairs Ministry to serve summons to officials of foreign-based companies for court appearances March 13.

In December, Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal said he had spoken repeatedly with officials from major Internet companies over the past three months and asked them to come up with a voluntary framework to keep offensive material off the Internet. He said that the companies told him there was nothing they could do.

There was no immediate comment by the networking sites after Friday's court proceedings.

However, Facebook said last month that it would remove content that "is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity."

Google said in a December statement that it removes content that violates local law and its own standards.

"But when content is legal and doesn't violate our policies, we won't remove it just because it's controversial, as we believe that people's differing views, so long as they're legal, should be respected and protected," Google said in a statement in December.

Sibal had shown reporters Web illustrations showing Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions as well as a site showing pigs running through Islam's holy city of Mecca, a clear insult to Muslims.

Sibal said the Internet companies had told him that they were applying U.S. standards to their sites, and he objected, saying that they needed to be sensitive to Indian sensibilities. ( Associated Press )

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Why your Facebook feed is crammed with visual gags

Why your Facebook feed is crammed with visual gags - On a normal day, the Facebook page for NYC Pride, the organization that puts on gay and lesbian pride events in New York, gets about 10 new fans. A typical NYC Pride wall post gets fewer than 50 comments, and very few posts get any “reshares” (that’s when a Facebook user decides to broadcast one of NYC Pride’s posts to his full network). But on Monday, a world-changing news story forever altered NYC Pride’s social media presence: Kim Kardashian got divorced.

A short time later, Chris Frederick, managing director of Heritage of Pride (NYC Pride’s parent group), spotted an image on Facebook that summed up the gay rights message in Kardashian’s divorce. It was a picture of Kardashian and her former husband, Kris Humphries, on their wedding day. Overlaying the image was a pithy taunt: “If you think gay marriage cheapens the institution, two words … Kim Kardashian.” On Tuesday morning, Frederick posted the image to NYC Pride’s page.

By Thursday morning, the post had received nearly 18,000 Likes, about 2,400 comments, and—most significantly—almost 14,000 shares. According to All Facebook, a site that keeps track of Facebook fan pages, NYC Pride saw a huge spike in Facebook fans—over the course of two days, it earned 1,000 new followers. Frederick told me that he doesn’t know who created the image—he doesn’t remember which of his friends posted it—but that it proved more effective than anything else the group has ever posted.

NYC Pride’s Kardashian image is just one example of a trend that has overrun Facebook. Over the last few weeks, my News Feed has been inundated with cartoons or photos with smart comments attached. These images are often political—I suppose my network leans left, because several are pro-Occupy Wall Street and anti-Tea Party. I particularly enjoyed this riff on the “we are the 99 percent” meme.

The technical name for a picture with superimposed text is an “image macro,” and these graphics are an ancient phenomenon online. (Remember Lolcats?) But while image macros have long been ubiquitous on 4Chan, Reddit, and Tumblr, they were never really so popular on Facebook. Not too long ago, most of the images you saw when you logged on to your Facebook page were pictures of your friends, their friends, and various kids and dogs.

But in the past few months, something changed. Now images on Facebook are more political, they’re less intimate, and they’re more calculated—many seem designed to become viral hits, and many do become viral hits. This isn’t happening just on my personal feed; many of my Slate colleagues say they’ve also noticed this phenomenon, as did several of my followers on Twitter. I contacted Facebook to ask about image macros, but I got no response. More helpful were two people who follow the site very closely: Nick O’Neill, the founder of All Facebook, and Josh Constine, the lead writer of Inside Facebook. (After I spoke to him, Constine announced that he’s just taken a job at TechCrunch.)

O’Neill and Constine proposed several theories for why image macros have overtaken Facebook. Let’s review them:

Credit the social network’s new algorithm.

As it seems to do once or twice a year, Facebook revamped its main page in September (as usual, people claimed to be unhappy with the changes, but they got used to them). The biggest change was to the news feed, which now features more recent content and gets updated with greater frequency. If you log in often, you rarely see the same status update twice. In other words, Facebook has lowered the bar for what appears in your feed. “Previously it was only the stories that got the most Likes or Shares or comments—or were posted by the user’s closest friends,” Constine says. But now a post with fewer Likes and Shares—and one that was posted by an acquaintance instead of a close friend—might make the feed as well.

Because this change favors stuff that was posted recently over stuff that’s more personal—and because personal content is less likely to go viral, since it’s relevant to a smaller number of people—Facebook has become a lot more receptive to posts that can be shared widely. Constine and O’Neill say other recent algorithm changes make Facebook better for spreading posts. The site now highlights stuff that several of your friends have shared (even if those people don’t know one another), and it posts a share count next to each item (and you’re likely to reshare something that has been shared often).

Taken together, these changes turn Facebook into a platform for viral hits. But that prompts another question: Even if Facebook is now a better host for viral messages, why have images with captions become the virus it’s most susceptible to?

Credit Facebook’s new look.

In addition to updating its algorithm, Facebook also changed the way posts are displayed in your feed. The biggest change involved photos. In the past, when a friend posted a photo, you’d see only a thumbnail of that image in your feed—you’d get a bigger version if you clicked on it.

But photos are now several times larger than they used to be. This was an obvious boon for image macros, whose power depends on the combination of a photo and text. In Facebook’s old, thumbnail-image design, pictures were too small for you to make out the text without clicking; now you can read the text and the image without doing anything.

Credit “meme generator” sites.

If images with text are now more prominent on Facebook, who’s creating them, and how? O’Neill mentioned another important factor in the spread of image macros: The rise of sites like Quick Meme and Meme Generator, which let the online hordes easily create their own graphics.

Such sites aren’t new, but O’Neill suspects that Facebook’s newfound hospitability to image macros has given them new life. And that could be feeding a cycle—the more popular image macros get on Facebook, the more people start creating and posting their own, which makes image macros even more popular, and on and on.

Credit Occupy Wall Street.

Facebook’s redesign coincided with the rise of a protest movement that has been especially adept at getting itself heard on social media sites. An outsized number of the image macros I’ve seen on Facebook were created to support OWS, and even the ones that aren’t directly supportive were at least inspired by the movement—see, for instance, the picture of the milk carton holding up a sign that reads, “I am healthier than whole but not as much as skim. I am the 2%.”

It may merely be lucky timing that OWS came along at just the moment Facebook became more receptive to images with text, but it’s also the case that OWS’s sometimes-convoluted goals are well-suited to image macros. Explaining the problem of income inequality is difficult in a tweet or a blog post, but you can get the message across easily in an infographic like this one, which shows a map of the United States with more than half the land allocated to the richest 10 percent of the population.

Credit all of the above.

There are usually many reasons why a message goes viral online, so it’s likely some combination of the factors I mentioned—and some others I didn’t—that’s causing image macros to become popular on Facebook. Both Constine and O’Neill pointed out that these changes don’t even need to be large. Since viral messages feed on themselves, it could be that all of these factors made image macros slightly more popular on Facebook—and then, the slight popularity pushed people to post more of them, which increased their popularity even more.

It’s also likely that Facebook didn’t mean to make the site more hospitable to image macros and that this was an unintended consequence of changes the site made for other reasons. Facebook’s goal, in making improvements to its site, is to get people to use it more. But it has no particular interest in how that happens. When the company first launched the Facebook Platform—which allowed third-party developers to create apps for the site—it didn’t predict that it would spawn a class of games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. The rise of image macros was also probably a surprise to Facebook’s execs. If it leads to more people spending more time on the site, though, I can’t imagine they’re disappointed. ( slate.com )

READ MORE - Why your Facebook feed is crammed with visual gags

Finally, a Tool That Links Up Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Practically Everything Else You Do on the Web

Finally, a Tool That Links Up Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Practically Everything Else You Do on the Web - I have recently become enamored with a cool little online tool that does nothing more than link up and sync all of my social-media accounts. The Web-based service, which made its official debut last month, is called Ifttt—pronounced, satisfyingly, just as it looks. And it wants to “put the Internet to work for you”—a wonderful goal, if one that says something about the technological saturation of modern life.

Ifttt is a semiacronym for “if this, then that,” and that pretty well captures how it works. You give the service a two-part command. If I’m tagged in a Facebook photo, then add it to my Dropbox account. If I tweet, then send it to my Google+ stream. If it’s going to rain in D.C. tomorrow, then send me an email. That’s it. It currently works with a few dozen popular services, including Facebook, Google and Gmail, Twitter, and Craigslist. It also links with any site using RSS or Atom feeds, giving access to the world’s blogs and news organizations, and can reach you by email and phone.

The combinations are endless. Want a phone call if it’s more than 80 degrees in Doha? Ifttt can do that for you. It can put every David Brooks column or Michael Lewis story directly into your Instapaper account. It can also put your Foursquare check-ins on your Google Calendar, if you want to keep track of where you were or who you met with. You can hand-make new options depending on what services you use. And you can borrow other people’s best Ifttt ideas in the recipes section of the site.

Ifttt, a handy new Internet service

Even if you don’t live chained to a computer or a smartphone screen, Ifttt can still do some cool stuff to make your life easier. Say you were on the hunt for a reproduction egg chair to round out your office, and you wanted to get a sense of prices on Craigslist. Ifttt could deliver all the relevant results for a month to your email or Evernote account, so that you did not have to wade through search results every day. One of Ifttt’s creators also suggests a specific use for director-of-technology types. If you get a “server alert” message delivered to your email, Ifttt will call you, making doubly sure you know your site is down.

Of course, the more of a social-media junkie you are in the first place, the more useful the service will be—Ifttt is already a cult hit among the life-hack set. For instance, I am currently juggling Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Twitter is the only service I use consistently, every day, but I wouldn’t mind having Ifttt update the others so I can better connect with my readers and sources, and maybe even see if I should shift attention to another platform.

The service has bigger ambitions than just to be a humble widget for big social media, though. In a post introducing the then by-invite-only product, its creators noted how hard it is to bend or adapt programs and sites and apps. You could buy a car and remake it as a bathtub if you felt like it. But for the most part, if you want to use Facebook, you can only use it how Mark Zuckerberg and the app makers think you should use it. “In the more abstract digital world … even the simplest of insights [requires] years of engineering experience to successfully implement,” they write. “[O]ver the past 20 years the layman’s technical vernacular has expanded blindingly fast. At the same time, we’ve been breaking down the core unit of definable functionality into ever smaller and more digestible pieces, from monolithic operating systems, to web based applications and mobile apps.”

That seems right to me. We are assaulted with a fire hose of digital information. That digital information tends to come in many disconnected streams. (It’s not for nothing that computer users flick between screens every 97 seconds, on average.) It has gotten easier to pull out the information we want—looking just at Facebook photos, or searching for certain hash-tagged tweets, for instance. But it is often terribly hard to get the services to interact with one another.

Over the years, many companies have attempted to address just that issue. Google, for instance, is trying to become a one-stop shop, adding things like daily deals and a social network so you never need to leave its yard to play elsewhere. Facebook is doing the same, adding in a messenger and shopping functions. Others have taken Ifttt’s tack, trying to knit different services together. Take the cool, if somewhat obscure, Yahoo! Pipes, which lets you “aggregate and manipulate” content from different sites.

I am not sure that Ifttt succeeds in the Herculean task of corralling all that digital information, nor that it is really trying to. (I, for one, admit to enjoying time spent idly wandering around in my various social-media accounts.) But it does succeed in making useful little tools. Nifttty, you might say. ( slate.com )

READ MORE - Finally, a Tool That Links Up Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Practically Everything Else You Do on the Web

J-Lo falls flat at the AMAs

J-Lo falls flat at the AMAs. J-Lo provided one of the unintentional highlights of the American Music Awards when she fell over on stage in the middle of her dance routine.

The star otherwise known as Jennifer Lopez landed on her famous behind mid-way through her performance of Louboutins.

J-Lo performs a daring dance move at the AMA's. Photo: Getty Images

She had climbed on to the back of a male dancer and jumped off, only to slip as she landed. Ever the professional, she quickly recovered her composure but was later filmed looking furious as she exited the auditorium.

It had all started so well, with the singer entering the arena dressed as a prizefighter for a boxing-inspired performance.

Afterwards, her spokesman reassured fans that Lopez had not been injured in the fall. "She's fine, totally fine," he said.

Lopez was not the only star to take a tumble at the ceremony. Adam Lambert, the former American Idol star, also slipped mid-way through his routine. However, that was the least noteworthy element of his performance, which was so risque that it provoked furious complaints from viewers who felt it was too graphic for a primetime audience.

Other performers at the ceremony included Rihanna, Lady GaGa and Whitney Houston.

Michael Jackson won four posthumous awards, which were accepted by his brother, Jermaine, wearing a glittery white glove in tribute to the late star.

The biggest winner of the night was Taylor Swift, who won five trophies including Artist of the Year. ( © Telegraph.co.uk )

READ MORE - J-Lo falls flat at the AMAs

How to keep your web page private and safe

How to keep your web page private and safe. Accept friend requests safely. Only accept friend requests from people you know and report any messages or profiles that look suspicious.

Only confirmed friends can post to your wall or contact you via Facebook chat, so if you're worried that someone will make inappropriate posts or send offensive messages, you should ignore that person's request.

Use the 'blocking' function to stop abusive behaviour

A block prevents specific people from viewing a profile. When one is implemented, any ties that users have with the people you block will be broken, and these people won't be able to contact you through Facebook. If you receive abusive communication, we recommend that you block the offender by listing his or her name in the 'blocking people' box at the bottom of the privacy page.

Report abusive behaviour directly to Facebook

Reports are confidential and the user being reported does not know that they have been reported.

Facebook will investigate the issue and decide whether the content should remain on the site based on its terms of use.

A Facebook administrator looks into each report thoroughly to decide the appropriate course of action.

Control bullying by restricting privacy settings

To restrict the amount of information that potential bullies may have access to, users can also restrict the privacy settings on their Facebook accounts and can also customise their privacy settings to avoid being found in searches or having their profile viewed publicly.

Respond to abusers in the right way

Delete offensive posts from your wall or messages from your inbox and then use the 'blocking' or 'reporting' functions to resolve the issue safely. ( @ Independent News )

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Online nightmares

Online nightmares: How one teen went missing after agreeing to meet her online friend, Ashleigh Hall, 17, was found dead after going to see a man whom she allegedly met on the Net. Here, Mary Kozakiewicz recalls her own daughter's horrific ordeal.

"On New Year's Day in 2002 we had a family dinner. As I was clearing the table before I put the apple pies out for dessert, Alicia said she wasn't feeling well and asked to go upstairs. I said: "Sure, go ahead." Later, when she didn't respond to my call, I sent her brother up. He said: "She's not in her bedroom." She was gone just like that.

I had never been concerned about Alicia's internet use. She was 13, and although she was on the internet a couple of hours a day, all the kids in Pittsburgh were. I used to tell her: "Go outside, do something, go and play."

But she'd show me the monitor, and all her friends were there chatting with each other. We trusted that she was safe. Kids stopped reading books, they wrote things online, they did their homework online. They had profiling pages that they could fill out with their favourite things and a picture.

Alicia was a shy child, she didn't run on the streets, there was nobody's home she would have gone to at dinner time on New Year's Day. It was one of the coldest days of the year, icy, snowy and dark. We checked the yard, looked in the basement, finally we called the police. They said: "She'll be home by morning, she's probably with a friend," and they left.

It's surreal, you move into a different realm of consciousness because there's no answer. You're totally helpless. No warning. There was no sign of forced entry. She took nothing with her, no coat, no boots. She'd received money for Christmas. It was still on her dresser.

I was not computer-savvy at the time; I was a stay-at-home mum. My husband was a salesman in an office where people were starting to use email and there were urban legends of internet predators, and it was him who made the link. He told the police, they took away the computer, went through its history but they saw nothing. On the second day we were told that recovering her would probably be a million to one shot because there were no clues. We got her quickly into the media through the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, and posters went up.

But my husband was right. In the apparent safety of her bedroom my daughter had met a man online, a 38-year-old computer programmer from Herndon, Virginia, whom she had been introduced to in a chat room. He had persuaded her to meet him. We learnt later that he was divorced. His daughter had just spent Christmas with him; she was my daughter's age.

He dropped his own daughter off at the airport and then drove into Pittsburgh to pick up mine. His intention was to make her his sex slave. My daughter believes she had a very short shelf life. He held her captive in a dungeon he had created in his basement, he raped her, he abused her, he beat her, he tortured her, he kept her chained with a locking dog collar around her neck.

We found her only because he showed a video of himself with her to a crony of his, another weirdo. This man called the FBI, fearing that the predator was going to kill my daughter, and that he would be an accomplice because he had seen the abuse.

The FBI broke into the house, I think it was on January 5. It was all one long day to me, I never slept, I never ate. We had a phone call from the FBI saying we needed to come down immediately. It had been four days, and three quarters of all stranger-abducted children are dead within three hours. I thought I was going to identify my daughter.

They ushered us into a room and the agents told us they had managed to save her. That was the best moment of my life. The next morning they flew us to Virginia and we got her back. But we will always ask: Could we have done more? And how could we have known?

When kids socialise online there is no such thing as a stranger, and we parents were simply not aware of that. Kids have their real-life flesh and blood friends at school. These friends introduce them to a friend who goes to a school in the next town but they're not a stranger because they have a friend in common. Friends have friends who have friends and maybe a month or two later, or perhaps just days, they're speaking to the most unsavoury of characters.

Kids don't think. They assume everything is okay because they know the name of this guy's puppy, his sister, his mother, all of which can be false.

To this day, I have no idea what this predator told my daughter. When you're horribly traumatised your brain refuses to remember some things.

Alicia, too, has huge gaps in her memory. I know she and the predator talked about everything but I don't know the details, partly because Alicia doesn't remember a lot, and partly because any sexual element is not something we talk about. It's too painful. But I know that he gradually became her best friend, he supported her emotionally, listened to her problems.

Thirteen is a difficult age, her friends were starting to do crazy things and she felt that she wasn't fitting in any more. I realise now that those feelings can be manufactured by the predator. He pulls you apart.

Just as a husband abuses his wife, a predator online will pull a child away from her family and friends, to make her dependent on him. If the child has a bad grade at school, he'll say: "That's fine, your teacher's stupid." If your friends say something not nice, it's: "Do I ever say things like that?" This man appeared to offer my daughter unconditional love.

When we got Alicia back it was very painful. The child that is returned to you after something like this is not the child that left. But we were lucky, she was alive. The law enforcement officers did not denigrate Alicia. They told her she was a hero for having survived, that she kept her head, did what she had to do to keep herself alive. The predator got 20 years. His name was Scott Tyree but we don't use it because it gives him credence.

Did I miss any signs of internet "grooming"? I don't call it grooming, I call it internet seduction. It's starry little princesses dreaming of Prince Charming and getting the bogeyman instead.

The problem for parents is that most teenage children are argumentative, spend a lot of time in their room, enjoy spending hours on the internet late at night. So how do you work out what is simply the behaviour of a normal adolescent?

When we found Alicia on the computer late at night she would say: "I forgot to do my history paper," and sure enough there would be a history paper. What parent is going to say: "Don't be conscientious, don't stay up and finish that paper"? Of course you say: "Honey finish it up quick and get to bed."

What parents have to realise is that the internet is the focus of our children's lives. What they're doing online is the same thing that everyone is doing: they're seeking love, attention, they're bored. Anything that they can't do in real life, they can do online, and engaging in a virtual world is now part of their growing up. If you're 12 and have braces you can go online and be 23 and a femme fatale. It's a game, it's fun, whatever's offered to them they grab without thinking.

Some parents find it hard to understand their children's growing awareness of their sexuality but our kids are sexually aware and they talk about sex on the internet. All we can do is make our children aware that the dangers out there are very real.

Alicia is 21 now and still has flashbacks, nights when it's hard to sleep. She studying psychology and forensics at university and wants to join the FBI and eventually work with traumatised children.

But life is harder for her than it would have been. We try to make sure that what happened to her doesn't happen to others. We go into schools and speak with kids about it. Alicia doesn't say: "Don't go on Myspace or Facebook," because kids are going to do that.

But she does try to teach them to be aware of differentiating between who is a stranger and who isn't. And to make the danger real to them, she shows them her missing posters and the newspaper stories from when she was found -- with headlines such as "Girl found safe but tied up".

Alicia describes the internet as possibly the greatest social experiment of all time but one in which children can be the sacrificial guinea pigs. I use the analogy of a loaded gun. No one warned us about it yet they blamed us when the kids started to shoot themselves.

Mary and Alicia Kozakiewicz run The Alicia Project helping to give support, information and education about internet predators.( @ Independent News )

READ MORE - Online nightmares

How social sites are a hunting ground for people with grudges

How social sites are a hunting ground for people with grudges. Be warned, writes Nikki Walsh, the school-yard bully has gone digital.

Julia*(19) is a business student from Dublin. She and her boyfriend Declan (20) became victims of cyberbullying when photographs of her and Declan were Fotoshopped and uploaded onto Facebook portraying him as a pig.

"It was all done in jest, in a jokey, jokey way, but it was not very nice," admits Julia. "It would have been different if we knew the people involved, but we didn't so it was odd and sinister." Eventually Julia found out that the bully was an admirer of hers, hoping to undermine her boyfriend.

"I see him all the time," she says, "but I have never spoken to him. In fact, I stay well away from him now."

Julia's experience is not unusual. According to a study by the Anti-Bullying Centre at Trinity College, Dublin, one in seven teenagers are victims of cyber-bullying, with most of it occurring on social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo.

It takes many forms -- repeatedly posting insults on people's 'walls'; starting online fights via email or instant messaging; posting embarrassing or humiliating photographs; tricking people into revealing secrets or sharing them online; impersonating people and posting material to damage their reputation; and even creating new sites under a person's name.

When Karen* (28) logged onto Facebook she found a new page under her name, using her original profile photograph. "Someone had created a new page for me, listing a whole new set of activities and interests in my profile, including 'sleeping around'. There were also postings on my wall calling me a slut. I was shocked."

Karen made a complaint and the site was closed down, but she did not know who created it until months later when she split up with her boyfriend and discovered it was the work of his ex-girlfriend. She has left Facebook now.

"It is not worth it," she said. "You have no idea who could be raking through your photographs. It's the perfect hunting ground for people with grudges or jealous exes."

While cyberbullying doesn't happen in person, it can, for that reason, be far more brutal than normal bullying. "People say things online that they would never actually say to each other's faces," says Julia.

"In schools, all fights are conducted through Facebook," she explains.

Frances Sweetman teaches civics in Dublin. "Most of the children I teach believe that if you put your photograph and your personal information on Facebook, you are asking for a bit of flak," she says.

According to A Parent's Guide to Social Networking Sites, some 28pc of teens say they do not know what to do if they are harassed or bullied online. Most do nothing. Julia and her boyfriend did not approach their bully, nor did Karen.

So, what should they be doing? Online experts advise everyone to avoid contact with the bully; block their access to the site; change their online information where necessary; file a report or lodge a complaint with the site and, if need be, to delete their account.

Sinead* (32) left Facebook last year after an ex began posting notes on her wall. "I am glad I didn't feed it," she says. "It was much more effective to just leave and not get embroiled in anything nasty or emotionally draining. As soon as I left, that was the end of it. I never heard from him again."

There are also measures anyone can take to avoid being bullied, as detailed by Facebook on their site (see below).

Facebook is self-regulating, so users can -- and do -- report content that is questionable or offensive. Any groups that violate its terms of use are removed, while fake profiles are regularly disabled when they're reported. Facebook is keen to stress that social networking, if used safely and correctly, can be fun. Psychologists agree, believing that networking sites develop teenagers' social skills, bridging class and racial divides and providing them with a forum for issues they feel they can't talk about face to face.

So how can parents protect their teens from cyberbulling? Communication is key -- WiredSafety.org research shows that teenagers who discuss social networking websites with their parents behave more cautiously online, so parents should open up a discussion on cyberbullying, educating their teens about how cyberbullies can use their personal information against them and discussing what information is appropriate for them to share online.

Boundaries should also be set. Teens should be wary of anyone who they do not know who wants to join their networks and they should be told not to meet anyone they've met online.

Left unchecked, the effects of cyberbullying can be devastating -- just last month, English-born school girl Holly Grogan jumped to her death after years of being cyberbullied. In a statement her family said: "Holly struggled to cope with the huge pressures placed upon her by the modern complexities of 'friendship groups' and social networking." ( @Independent News )

READ MORE - How social sites are a hunting ground for people with grudges