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those are great thoughts. you are right, the human language, in all forms, is a challenging beast. that’s one of the reasons why we a) started with English only, and b) are targeting a specific problem - the inappropriate relationships with children.

the language and patterns that people use to initiate, develop and maintain inappropriate relationships with children are pretty well understood. our engine is built in such a way that it can evolve and be tuned. no solution is perfect, but we believe, and our customers have told us, this is a far better solution than anything on the market.

with respect to the griefing you mentioned, a person can only leave feedback when our engine flags something in a conversation, and feedback is numerical and can only be negative. further, you cannot look at someone’s profile rating unless that person makes IM contact with an account you are monitoring *and* something in the conversation gets flagged, so that certainly insulates some of the defamation issues you bring up.

this is great feedback, and we love hearing from current and potential customers. i hope you don’t mind if i address this at length over at our blog. parents will be very interested to see more of this type of discussion.

“Texas is not in the South.”

Really, genius? Please, provide a geography lesson for the rest of us then.

Based on my experience with various kinds of filters, it’s very hard to weed out any kind of “bad language” (however you define it) without generating a lot of false positives. Human language is just too slippery. And in this context, false positives may be a serious problem. It sounds to me like they build profiles on people and assign them some sort of threat rating. In this context, giving someone a high threat rating is more or less equivalent to saying, “we think this person is a sexual predator.” If you’re going to make that statement about someone to hundreds or thousands of users, you’d better be sure you can back it up, or you could be facing some painful defamation suits.

Finally, I wonder if they’ve anticipated the possibility of griefing. Teenagers aren’t known for temperance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few tech-savvy friends decided that it would be amusing to log in as parents and vote someone into “level 5″ status.

It’s about time someone put forth some innovative ideas to protect children on the internet. It seems that many parents alone aren’t having much success.

Oh well, overall this product looks good, and hope it catches on as protecting children is becoming more and more impossible.