Today, I attended a conference in Westchester, NY sponsored by WiredSafety.org, an organization that, amongst other things, teaches preteens and teens how to be tech leaders in their schools and communities. And believe me, there's nothing as effective as one 16 year old telling another that they're a jerk for sharing too much personal information online.

Some of the testimonials I heard at the conference were gut-wrenching. Dana was the Mom of a 13 year old girl who was killed in a car accident last year when she and her friends stole a car and took it on a joy ride. After her daughter's death, Dana tried repeatedly to get into her daughter's MySpace account looking for clues as to what her daughter was all about. She repeatedly called MySpace asking for her daughter's password. Her calls were never returned. Neither were her emails. She found her way to WiredSafety where it's founder, Parry Aftab, put in a few calls for her. Finally Dana got her daughter's password and entered the world of MySpace.

When she went to her daughter's page the headline on her last entry seared through her. It said, "Priceless: Joyriding with Your Friend at 3AM". Dana says after reading her daughter's entries she realized she knew nothing about this place where her daughter could freely "promote her indulgences, had no accountability and just be cool". She found her daughters friends on the site, too. She read their words and looked at their photos. All were looking for trouble; all were not being watched.

Today, Dana will tell her story to anyone who'll listen and hope that it will get retold so that parents realize how important it is to understand this part of their kid's lives and how critical it is for the social networking companies to be more responsive to a family's pain and concern.

Throughout the conference it was clear that parents felt that the social networking sites had created a place where the potential for trouble was high but the company's responsiveness to queries and calls for help were often left unanswered.

Today, in the face of a lawsuit involving the assault of a 14 year old, loss of advertising revenue and way too much bad press, MySpace announced some first steps in a cleanup campaign. Adults will now have to prove they know the email name or first and last name of a minor with a MySpace page before they'll be allowed to make contact. And members of all ages will now be able to make parts of their profiles available only to friends. It's an important step, and many other social network sites are scurrying to do the same.

MySpace isn't alone here; it's just the largest and most visible. Companies have a responsibility to their customers and in the case of social networks, when the customer is a kid with parents, that goes double.