Kuddle: social media with a safety net

A new photo-sharing app aimed at children attempts to offer all of the fun and interaction of sites like Instagram but without any of social media's negative aspects.

A new photo-sharing app aimed at children attempts to offer all of the fun and interaction of sites like Instagram but without any of social media's negative aspects.

Called Kuddle, the creators want to promote happy sharing by creating a protective, parental-controlled social media environment where kids can post pictures without the fear of cyberbullying, trolling or stumbling upon something or someone unsuitable.

It does this by only allowing children to sign up to use the app via a parent's email address. Then, every time a child posts an image to the site, the parent is notified. Furthermore parental approval is also needed before a child can become friends with another user.

Photos that do make it onto the site can only be seen by a user's friends, they carry no geo-tagging information and, perhaps best of all, there is no comment function, just a 'like' button and even that is anonymous to avoid children getting into popularity contests with other users.

As well as attempting to teach children social media etiquette, Kuddle also tries not to impede on their creativity. As well as snapping images or uploading pictures from a phone's camera roll, users can also annotate, draw on and add effects to pictures they post and captioning is also allowed.

The free app launched this week and is available for Apple and for Android devices.