The Internet Destroying Our Families? Not So Fast, Says New Pew Study.

Since the advent of the ‘Internets’, pundits have been pontificating about technology’s role in the brewing break-up of the American family.

Stories about bleary-eyed kids mesmerized by the PC instead of Mom’s meatloaf, chattering on the cell with their bffs instead of playing catch with Dad and IM-ing from the basement rec room to say ’sweet dreams’ have been rampant for years.

Which is why this Digital Parent is so thrilled with today’s release of a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which says among all kinds of households, the traditional “nuclear” family has the highest rate of technology use and ownership. Tech-friendly connectedness and sharing of things online is common.

This is true.  My daughter told me yesterday she had received three ‘fart’ youtube links from her Dad. 

The Pew study found that households with a married couple and minor children are more likely than other household types - including single adults, homes with unrelated adults such as roommates or group homes, or couples without children - to have mobile phones and use the Internet.

The nationwide survey of 2,252 adults shows technology heavily influencing family life, letting parents and children stay in touch more regularly and view material online together. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

Some of the key findings include:

• Cell phones and high-speed Internet connections are common: 89% of married-with-children households own multiple cell phones, and 66% have high-speed Internet connections - well above the national average of 52% for all households, according to Pew.

• 42% of parents contact their children every day via cell phone, making cell phones the most popular communication tool between parents and children.

• 52% of married-with-children households go online together at least a few times a week, and another 34% of those families have “shared screen moments” at least occasionally.

• 70% of couples in which both partners own a mobile phone contact each other daily to say hello or chat, while 54% of couples who have only one or no cell phones do.

• 64% of couples in which both partners own a cell phone contact each other daily to coordinate their schedules; 47% of couples who have one or no cell phones do.

And staying connected through technology doesn’t mean sacrificing traditional forms of family togetherness such as sharing a meal. About 80% of families with multiple cell phones or multiple computers said they had dinner together every day or almost every day, according to Pew.

“One thing that surprised me is how together American families are now,” said Barry Wellman, sociology professor at the University of Toronto and an author of the study. “There is always a lot of information - a lot of hype - about how things are falling apart, and the latest boogeyman has been the Internet.

“What we are getting is that people are using it to be connected during the day and then at night and weekends they are staying together - they are not going their separate ways.”

And just in case they do go their separate ways — like off to college — this connectedness may actually increase.  I always know where my daughter is at midnight on a Saturday night in Berkeley. I simply check her Facebook status.

Thanks to jsonline.

What Will Your Startup Be Worth in 3 Years? Ask YouNoodle’s Startup Predictor.

Better than the Magic 8 Ball? YouNoodle Launches The New Startup Predictor.

What will your startup be worth in 3 years? YouNoodle’s sophisticated model analyzes information on startups before they get funding to help predict their outcomes.

The scoop on YouNoodle:
YouNoodle develops innovative ways to bring together the information, people and technology that help startups succeed.

We provide a platform for so far 50 of the world’s top university entrepreneurship clubs and competitions, serving tens of thousands of members and thousands of startups. Our tools help to effectively manage business competitions, events, mailing lists and community development. If you run a group and would like to join the platform apply and we’ll get in touch.

Startup Predictor is the first in a series of decision-making tools YouNoodle plans to introduce for the startup industry. Our development team studied thousands of current and past startups, using both publicly available and proprietary data, to determine patterns of predictive factors for early-stage companies’ success. You can try the test for free. (Not surprisingly) YouNoodle is based in San Francisco, California.

Guru’s Take on YouNoodle. Throughout my seemingly endless years in dotcom land, I have learned a valuable lesson: When you hear that press-pro Susan MacTavish Best is involved in a new project, listen up. Susan always seems to be at the heart of the coolest, most intriguing ventures. YouNoodle is yet another one of them. Contact her: Susan@bestpr.net

Note: Susan’s mom lives down here in the wildfire country of Carmel. So we know where she got her smarts.

The Death of Email. RIP Email.

Email has been ailing for quite some time. I knew it was on its last legs and even with a fresh infusion of retro Rocketmail from Yahoo, things have not been looking good. Then last night on ABC Family’s new “The Secret Lives of Teenagers” the official death rattle sounded. One of the show’s main characters, clearly the series’ resident good girl, stared directly into the camera, opened her perfectly-puffed lips and delivered the final blow: “Email? No one emails anymore.”

Today, mere hours after this chilling proclamation, Facebook launched its new interface, upping its privacy standards and increasing its focus on improved user experience. MySpace has cleaned up its interface as well and has more upgrades in the works. Uber-user-friendly and growing phenom etsy.com, funded in January to the tune of $27 million from Accel Partners and others, is also growing its social networking features.

And just days ago, Hitwise recently reported that traffic to Twitter increased 500 percent for the week ending July 5, 2008, compared with the same period last year. That’s a killer jump for a service that’s plagued with technical glitches and perpetually flashes its famous Fail Whale.

A study by the Pew Research Center waay back in 2005 revealed that even then, almost half of online teenagers preferred to chat with friends via IM rather than e-mail. And that was before Apple’s iPhone.

Can email be saved? Should email be saved? Stay tuned.

Yahoo! to Microsoft: “I’m Just Not That Into You.”

According to the New York Times, Yahoo has once again spurned an offer from Microsoft. The proposal came late Friday evening from Alpha-Suitors Steve Ballmer and Carl Icahn. Yahoo was given 24-hours to make its decision, which is like really random when it’s so last-minute and on a Friday night (when we usually pretend to be out with Google or maybe Rupert) and feels way like a booty call.

But just hours into the speed-date, spitfire Yahoo decided to play hard to get, bad-mouthing Microsoft to like everybody in the whole entire world, calling the proposal ‘ludricrous’ and like ‘erratic, unpredictable’ and ‘bludgeoning’ and probably even posting on its Super Wall.

Part of Yahoo’s hurt feelings resistance appears to come from the fact that Microsoft now only has eyes for its search business. Rather accept this new pieces-parts strategy, in which Co-Suitor Mr. Icahn, would have taken over the remaining parts of the company, Yahoo insists on being loved truly, madly deeply ‘just as I am.’ Then it went back to lying on its bed with like zillions of pillows and watching old Billie Holiday ‘All of Me’ videos on youtube.