Pros & Cons
-
- Engaging protected online environment for kids with millions of pre-approved content items.
- Offers social interaction and sharing without any personal information.
- Parents can monitor activity remotely.
- Can use on multiple computers.
-
- Starting in grade school, kids will find the program more and more limiting.
- In testing, the interactive features lagged hours behind real time.
KidZui 5.0 Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Mac OS |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows 7 |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Tech Support: | Free phone and e-mail support |
| Type: | Personal |
Kids today see their modern parents spending time on the computer, surfing the Web, playing games, and keeping in touch with friends via social networks—and they want to play, too! But especially for the youngest, unlimited access to the computer that holds all your financial information, programs, pictures, and so on is just a bad idea. KidZui 5.0 ($7.95 per month, direct) lets kids use the computer without exposing them to the seamy side of the Internet or putting local programs and files at risk. It's great for toddlers and preschoolers, but older kids will chafe at its limitations.
Introduced in spring of 2008, KidZui now boasts over a million registered kids and parents. This latest version offers even more ways for kids to safely interact with each other and with their parents. A free edition gives kids access to almost all KidZui content but limits their ability to personalize the experience. Paid subscribers get parental reporting and activity monitoring.
Becoming Zui
Within the KidZui environment each kid creates an avatar called a Zui by choosing and coloring various traits. Head shape, eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and skin color define the Zui's body. Kids next add shirts, pants, shoes, hats, glasses, and even hobbies. To keep up interest, KidZui adds seasonal items. Right now a Santa suit, Christmas tree costume, and reindeer antlers are available. Also, the main page will occasionally offer a special item for a limited time only; last week it was a snowboard.
Creating those Zuis is part of the setup process, so you'll want the kids around when you first configure the program. After that, they're free to change their Zui's appearance at any time. Certain items display a lock icon; to unlock those, kids must accumulate points and reach higher levels. Gaining points is easy—they accrue as the kids enjoy the KidZui environment. (Yes, where some parental-control products put time limits on computer use, KidZui's point system does the opposite.) Free users can accumulate points, but they don't "level up."
After KidZui launches at startup, the child just clicks the correct Zui image on the login screen. Password protection for kid accounts is optional but hardly necessary. Kids can easily log out to let a sibling play, but can't exit the KidZui environment without the parental password. Keystrokes like Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Ctrl-Esc and the Windows key are suppressed—I couldn't break out.
Like
KidZui displays a program-generated home page at startup, and clicking the house icon always comes back to this page. Content tabs across the top let children choose Web sites, photos, or videos; buttons down the left side select predefined categories. The home page also lists the most popular Web pages and offers big buttons so kids can play games, watch funny videos, surf the Web, or edit their Zuis' appearance.
An activities area in the middle cycles through images promoting activities within KidZui. For example, it currently includes links to holiday videos, winter-themed games, and special Zui dress-ups for the season. This changing content is clearly aimed at keeping the kids engaged—there's even a "best-dressed Zui" contest every week.
Kid-Friendly Content
All of KidZui's content comes from the Internet. That means the kids can't run games installed on the local computer. By the same token, they can't accidentally screw up your important files. A team of experts has approved well over two million Web sites, photos, and videos, so your kids won't run out of new content soon. Parents don't specify categories to allow or block the way they do in
Clicking a category at left brings up a grid of a dozen matching Web sites and also changes the category list to reflect subcategories and related categories. As the kids surf around and follow links they may run across pages not yet rated by KidZui. Naturally those aren't displayed, but the program says they're "now on our list to review." Some sites are actively blocked but offer a note saying "your parents can add it for you."
Search sites like Google and Yahoo are among those blocked, and there's little point in using the parental override to allow them because every search results page is "not yet rated." Instead of using standard search sites, the kids simply type search terms in the address bar. As they type KidZui automatically suggests searches based on its stored content and on other searches.
The Photos and Videos tabs work the same way as the Web tab; kids choose categories or enter search terms. The photos are small and the videos mostly short so the kids don't get frustrated waiting. All approved videos (over 60,000) are also available on the Web at www.zuitube.com, which is powered by YouTube but not owned by or affiliated with it. There's even a ZuiTube iPhone app.
Many of KidZui's Web-based games are hosted by KidZui online, but the service also pulls in games from other approved sites. I did notice that these outside games occasionally displayed advertisements that seemed a bit "off"—does your little girl really need "bikinis in new hot styles"? But nothing truly objectionable showed up.—
Sharing Is Good
Playing games and Web surfing are more fun when they can be done with friends. What really sets KidZui apart is a clever system that lets kids interact and share without ever revealing any private information. To start, kids can tag any Web site, game, photo, or video by clicking an icon for "lol," "boring," "awesome," and many more. Some tags are available only at higher membership levels. For example, none of my sample Zuis can yet tag an item as "evil" or "angelic." An info button summarizes the item's tags from other members, and a "Who's tagging" bar displays the most recent tags and taggers.
The child can also share an item with any friend simply by clicking that friend's Zui face and name. The sent item shows up in the friend's inbox. There's no information sent other than your child's Zui name and pointer to the shared item.
How do children meet KidZui friends? If they know the other user's Zui name they can simply enter it and make a friend request—once the other user responds, they're connected. They can also send friend requests to friends of friends or click on a tagged item and send a friend request to the tagger.
Kids can choose from dozens of simple phrases reflecting their current activity or status, such as "having fun," "excited," or "surfing." The friends bar shows all of the child's friends along with his or her selected status and online availability. Your child can "ping" a friend to send the electronic equivalent of a friendly wave. Another list shows recent events for friends including status changes, new friends, pings, and items tagged. Further enriching the experience, kids can click an icon to share content with parents via e-mail and parents can use a bookmarklet to send interesting items to their kids.
The home page includes a link to invite real-world friends to KidZui. This will probably require help from a parent. With parental assistance, kids can e-mail or print an invitation or send one via
Remote Control
Parents with a paid subscription can log into KidZui.com for a full report on what their kids have been doing. The report graphs how many minutes each child spent on KidZui each day in the last week, month, three-month, or six-month period. It offers a full list of activities, a list of the most-visited Web sites, and a list of any sites that were blocked. Parents can drill down into the activity list to see all Web sites, videos, or photos as well as categories used and searches performed. The new Interest report analyzes the categories your child has interacted with and flags those they seem most interested in, along with indicators for items going up or down in interest.
Parents can also see each child's list of friends and optionally block unwanted friends. But because the KidZui environment pretty much makes unpleasant interaction impossible, it's hard to say why you'd block a friend. You can see the items your child has marked as "favorites." The parental page also lets you grant access to blocked or unknown Web sites.—
I had to delay this review for a couple of weeks because of a server migration at KidZui. The service was totally functional but no activity showed up in the parental report, Zui appearance was wrong online, and kids did not visibly accumulate points. That seems to have settled down, although my two KidZui accounts still can't "see" each other as online. If kids using the program noticed that they stopped accumulating points toward the next level, I imagine they were irked.
Peanut Butter PC also has a more obscure security hole in that a child could get full access to the computer from any File Open dialog box. KidZui doesn't allow local programs, but it does allow printing. A youthful hacker could parlay the printer dialog box into a File Open dialog, but here again the Windows Explorer window is hidden by the KidZui window.
I did find a couple of instances where Internet Explorer error messages appeared on top the KidZui window—a warning about Java and an offer to install language packs. By clicking available links, I managed to open the Internet Explorer help system and, more seriously, Internet Explorer Options. The kids could certainly cause problems by tweaking IE options, but I found no way to actually break out of the program.
KidZui 5.0 aims to give your children the experience and fun of using the computer and surfing the Web, and up to a point it truly succeeds. Preschoolers and young grade-schoolers will be entertained endlessly. But though the program optimistically offers homework help up to the eighth grade level, it's really not suited for older kids.
More Parental Control Reviews:
Final Thoughts
KidZui 5.0
KidZui lets youngsters surf the Web, play games, view videos and interact socially online, "just like Mommy and Daddy." The protected environment is extremely lively, but don't expect your kids to still like it once they've started using computers in school.