It’s something you’d expect to hear from your mother, not your government, but New York’s newest laws are all about exercising common sense when looking for love online.

Sounding like something between a schoolteacher and a public service announcement, the Internet safety act will require online dating websites to warn their users about the potential perils of web-based romance.

The caveats seem like the kind of best practices any mindful Internet user would have internalized years ago. Things like not giving out your physical address and providing your own transportation on initial dates, for example, are no-brainers.

But the act also includes clauses about not revealing your employer or last name; a simple search engine could be used as a tool for stalking or much worse in the grimmest scenarios.

And another point made in the act is proof of how much dating has changed in the past 20 years: Users are warned against giving out their phone numbers in the first volley of emails back and forth between themselves and any strangers they may meet on a dating site.

Basically, the government is trying to make sure dating websites do everything they can to keep users from releasing identifying information until it’s safe and appropriate.

Although online dating is huge business, we can’t imagine many companies having a problem with this requirement of consumer awareness, depending on how it’s carried out. In fact, such a law might even be beneficial on a national level. One other state — New Jersey — has enacted such a law already.

What do you think of the Internet safety act in New York? Do you think it’s an appropriate, common-sense measure for dating websites to have to take? Or is it a futile reaction to Internet-linked violent crimes, which may have little to do with dating sites specifically?

Let us know your opinions in the comments.

More About: dating website, internet safety act, law, new york, online dating

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New York’s Newest Law Aims to Protect Online Daters

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Since Twitter acquired Tweetie and rolled out an official iPhone client, the company has focused more and more on improving the mobile experience across all smartphone platforms.

Twitter CEO Ev Williams wrote just now on the company blog that mobile usage of the site is up 62% since in just over four months, and 16% of all new Twitter users are starting out on mobile devices as opposed to web signups (this number is up from just 5% earlier this year).

In the days before Twitter started issuing official apps on a platform-by-platform basis, the company wasn’t seeing the kind of mobile adoption it had hoped for. Williams wrote, “Even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called ‘Twitter.’ This kept them from using Twitter at all.”

The company adopted a new strategy for mobile; rather than leaving all the mobile app development to third parties, Twitter decided to consolidate efforts. In the short term, this caused some consternation for third-party devs; however, looking at Twitter’s stats, it’s clear the company did the right thing for its shareholders and bottom line.

Twitter acquired Tweetie in May this year; this was our first indication that Twitter would be creating and distributing its own mobile apps for a change. Tweetie was revamped and renamed Twitter for iPhone in May. A BlackBerry app was released in April, and the company’s official Android Twitter app was released later the same month.

Twitter is also seeing strong growth in its mobile site and SMS service, and Williams notes that third-party apps such as TweetDeck continue to be valuable and important parts of the Twitter mobile landscape.

And as for the long tail, Williams writes, “There are a tremendous number of other apps that people are using, not necessarily as their main Twitter client, but as an alternative way to create or view Tweets. The number of registered OAuth applications is now at almost 300,000 — this number has nearly tripled since Chirp [Twitter's developer conference, which was held in April in San Francisco].”

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While the above chart shows percentages of unique users per app, we’d also love to see a breakdown by volume of tweets.

Has your own mobile usage of Twitter changed or grown at all with Twitter’s releasing several official apps? Do you still use third-party applications for tweeting on the go? Let us know what you think about these stats in the comments.

/>Reviews: Chirp Blu, Tvider Blackberry App , TweetDeck, Twitter, tweetie

More About: apps, Mobile 2.0, twitter

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Twitter Mobile Usage Skyrocketed With “Official” Apps [STATS]

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Kembrel

Quick Pitch: A private store for students that can be accessed entirely through Facebook, from browsing to checkout.

Genius Idea: Launched by two students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, Kembrel is a private shopping community for just for college students. The site has partnered with a few well-known lifestyle brands to offer deep discounts on goods during a limited window of time.

To give you an idea of the specifics, most of these discounts range from 40% to 75% off the retail price of the item in question, and sales generally start at 9 p.m. EST and last for just five days.

The company’s goal is to help students discover new brands and obtain highly coveted products while saving a lot of money, possibly avoiding a starving student scenario or two. Of course, such a store also gives brands optimal exposure to an important demographic and helps them build long-term relationships with their customers through a combination of social e-commerce and community management.

Kembrel isn’t the first company to start using Facebook as an e-commerce platform. In fact, we wrote recently about Delta selling tickets via Facebook. Right now, Kembrel can be accessed through the main website or via its Facebook store. It’s also not the first students-only app (we covered one of those a few days ago) or the first limited-window-of-time sales app (Groupon, anyone?). Still, it’s a clever mashup of all these ideas, and it’s offering some killer deals.

We can imagine many a college student getting excited about an exclusive, half-off American Apparel sale or a back-to-school special on iPhone accessories. And we can imagine investors getting excited about a good-looking app built on top of a far-reaching platform that also has out-of-the-box revenue potential.

What do you think of Kembrel so far?

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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A Facebook-Based Online Store Just for Students

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This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.

This is not your father’s world wide web. Thanks to soaring smartphone sales, new tablet devices like the iPad, and the burgeoning trend of connected devices, individuals are accessing and experiencing the web in a very different way than they were even five years ago.

The desktop browsing experience is also undergoing radical change, thanks to the evolution of JavaScript frameworks and the push for standards successors such as CSS3 and HTML5. It’s an exciting time to be developing or designing for the web.

Even for the seasoned developer, it can be difficult to know where to start if you want to embrace the new technologies of HTML5 and support new devices like the iPhone, Android-based smartphones or the iPad without neglecting users on older browsers. Fortunately, the collaborative nature of the web means that lots of developers and designers are working out best practices and solutions toward these problems together.

One of the most interesting new projects aimed at giving designers and developers a starting template for integrating HTML5 and other modern features into their sites is HTML5 Boilerplate.

Created by Paul Irish and Divya Manian, HTML5 Boilerplate is the product of more than two and a half years in iterative development, and it’s chock-full of best practices and techniques for creating cross-browser compatible websites that will work with legacy browsers (which means IE 6) while also being HTML5-ready.

To be clear, HTML5 Boilerplate is not a framework. It’s a template that can be modified and used for your own projects. You can use as much or as little as you want and make your own additions and subtractions. Still, it’s one of the most robust and well-commented starting points we’ve seen for setting up a solid HTML5 base for your projects.

One of the best things about HTML5 Boilerplate is that the source is openly available under a public domain license; you can use it and integrate it into your own projects in any way you want.

As a result, a ton of awesome projects have already used HTML5 Boilerplate alongside other techniques. Just check out this page on GitHub to see a sampling of some of the HTML5 Boilerplate-infused spin-offs.

Check out these additional tools, projects and resources to get the most out of HTML5 Boilerplate:

• The Source Itself – Available on GitHub for your watching/forking/commenting pleasure, this is the source for HTML5 Boilerplate. You can keep up with the latest changes, ask questions and make suggestions. You can also check out the various forks from around the community.
• Paul Irish’s Official HTML5 Boilerplate Screencast – Nettuts+ published this awesome 40-minute screencast that Paul Irish created to walk you through HTML5 Boilerplate. It shows off all the features and offers some awesome tips. Definitely check this out.
• Add 960 Grid System to Boilerplate – One of our favorite CSS frameworks is Nathan Smith’s 960.gs. It’s easy to add 960.gs to Boilerplate to create the best of both worlds.
• Use it with WordPress – Sam Sherlock created a really great WordPress theme that combines HTML5 Boilerplate with the Thematic WordPress theme framework. He has also infused many elements from the new default WordPress 3.0 theme TwentyTen.
• Some Tips To Keep in Mind – This collection of tips from Brian Blakely are good points of reference.

We’re really excited to see how HTML5 Boilerplate evolves and how other projects choose to integrate the template. It’s a terrific starting point for many designers and developers who just don’t have the time to pull all the little bits and information together when getting started with HTML5.

Are you using HTML5 in your designs? What tools are you using to ease the process? Let us know in the comments.

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More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

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- 5 Cross-Platform Mobile Development Tools You Should Try /> - 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter /> - 10 Tools for Distributed Developer Teams /> - 11 Delicious TextMate Themes for Designers and Developers /> - 7 Awesome CSS3 Techniques You Can Start Using Right Now

Images courtesy of HTML Boilerplate.

More About: 960.gs, divya manian, HTML5, html5 boilerplate, paul irish, Web Development, web development series

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