This morning I noticed something interesting when I logged in to my Myspace account. The following message was at the upper left (very noticeable) area of the main profile management page, which is the hub of a user’s Myspace experience:

ATTENTION: There is an Amber Alert in your area.
Please CLICK HERE to find out more information.

When expanded, the window overlaid the page with the following information (details removed):

Missing From: , ,
Missing Date:

Contact: Police - 911

SuspectName:
Gender:

Vehicle Information
Make:
Color:
License State:
Vehicle:

I’ve never seen this before, but after doing a little research on Myspace’s participation in the Amber Alert program, it seems that they have been working on this implementation since January. Gladly, there were no alerts visible to me in that time, as they are geo-targeted, meaning that there were no reported incidents of child abduction in my area.

This seems like a great move for Myspace, in light of the many criticisms that it is not doing enough to prevent use of its platform by sexual predators attempting to connect with underage users. Myspace has made some other efforts to quell these accusations, such as no longer allowing anyone under 14 to register and deleting over 250,000 profiles of users under the age of 14 last year. Also, users under the age of 18 no longer show up in the search results.

While I understand the concern for minors, I think that the social networking giant is doing its part (and really going above and beyond with the Amber Alerts) considering that the foundation of social networking is enabling user self-reporting and communication between individuals.

The United States Postal Service just whipped out something surprisingly innovative. As I was using their online address change service, which costs only a buck (for “ID authentication”…I wonder how much they bank on this), I got a few screens in and after gave my old address, new address and email, I was asked a rather interesting question:

“Which of these catalogs do you subscribe to? Most catalogs are not forwarded, but if you tell us which ones you subscribe to, we can make sure that they are sent.”

The list (with thumbnail images) had two check boxes next to each title. One was “already receive” and the other was “would like to receive”. I thought it was interesting that they were (a little sneakily) monetizing the traffic that was there to change their mailing address by certainly getting a kick back on catalog sign ups.

(Basically, the way that Co-Registration works - your contact information is passed to a 3rd party when you opt-in to other offers during a sign up or registration. The 3rd party pays a CPL (cost per lead) amount to the site that you were originally using)

As I proceeded to the confirmation screen, the co-registration/ 3rd party offers got pretty blatant, even pushing a sense of urgency with the “Available this visit only” copy. I just had to take a screen shot:

I’ve seen the USPS try all kinds of things to compete with other, private delivery services like DHL, UPS and Fedex (which has an arrow in it’s logo in case you didn’t notice), but this one really intrigues me. I’m going to have to dig on these guys a bit more…