WebKinz is a social network and playground that ties into a collectible stuffed animals business you’ll find at Hallmark and stationary and candy stores around the U.S. and Canada. The animals, which range in price from $10 to $17, come with a secret code (don’t throw away those labels!) that give your kids free access to the same animal in an online world. 

The Webkinz online experience is cute, game-oriented and designed for safety. All chat is prescripted and monitored. My daughter, a veteran member, tells me that the site is fun because, once you are in, there is no need to spend more real money. One earns KinzCash, virtual money, to spend on food and gifts for your pets in the Webkinz world by playing games and buying more stuffed animals at the local retail store.

Compared to other kids sites, such as NeoPets, which my daughter explains is “stupid because you have to spend so much money,” WebKinz provides an adorable setting for kids, especially girls, to have pleasant and cute-oriented friendships with other members. 

My daugther’s favorate place in WebKinz World is a kind of fitness center for her virtual animated pets, where all the dogs, cats, horses and unicorns trot on treadmills and get combed by their owners as the girls chat. Since the chats are scripted, they cannot get ugly or inappropriate, so the only thing you can have is fun. Chat is organized into topical areas to make it easy to focus on a topic, such where one’s favorite room is or what their favorite pet likes to do.

An an advanced version of the chat program, called KinzChat PLUS, kidsover 10 years of age can string together words from a pre-approved list, while the site monitors the resulting phrases to prevent passing personal information and to warn members of inappropriate combinations of words. Members can also alert monitors that they feel another member is using chat inappropriately.

Games on the site are education-oriented, emphasizing adding facts to the child’s knowledge, aiding spelling and solving logical problems. In terms of creating good habits, WebKinz does require your kids pay attention to, feed and care for, their pets or the little critters get sad and sort of sickly. It’s not quite like adopting a pet in the real world, but parents can use it as an object lesson when asked for a real pet.

Home Page: Webkinz.com
A virtual world for kids, where they can play with animated pets, chat and participate in games for fun.

Tags: avatars, chat, games, kid-safe, kids, virtual world

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Social Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.