How can preteens and teens chat online with their friends in a completely safe environment? This is something that toy and media companies have been fumbling over for the past several years. Well, Mattel has a pretty smart solution—it’s called Barbie Girls, and it’s a copasetic convergence between consumer product and online brand experience. Truth be told, I’m not sure why other consumer product and media companies haven’t made this connection sooner.

The process is simple—you go to the store, buy a Mattel Barbie Girl, and connect it to your computer via a docking station. When your girlfriends catch on and get one, you can authenticate your doll on their computers and vice-versa. Your child is now ready to communicate online with her friends and only her friends.

The online play experience is very Sim-like, in terms of game play patterns. Girls can go online and design their own rooms, check out their friends’ rooms and their objects, chat, play with their virtual pets and, of course, no little-girl pretend-play online experience would be complete without the all-important trip to the mall (where kids learn about online transactions). I’m only half kidding—I wouldn’t be surprised to see new Mattel products contextually placed inside the Barbie world, in-game advertising, or online conditioning for tweens.

The offline experience is not as robust as the online play experience, but the doll itself is an actual MP3 player; a good place to store Barbie tunes you downloaded from the website (note to Mattel: That one’s a freebie).

The technology is simple, and my guess is that this product will go a long way. Parents will be buying these toys for their kids and as presents for all their friends.

Flock Inc. has just released a new “social browser” that lets users interact with their favorite or most popular social networks on the web. Based upon Firefox and other Mozilla technologies, it is available for both Mac and PC and supports Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Blogsome, Wordpress, del.icio.us, TypePad, Twitter, Photobucket, Blogger, Livejournal, Xanga.com, Magnolia, and Piczo.

Flock neatly packages all its social networking features for easy access and updating, but I’m wondering why they created an entire browser to do this. Maybe the company should have partnered with all popular browsers and offered one plug-in that aggregates all social network information, but most browsers already have plug-ins that do this. Whenever a new social network pops up you will need to install a new plug-in into your Flock browser, so the maintenance is similar to most browsers out there.

It seems as if Flock is more like a social network that lets you manage all your existing social networks. But I’m not sure I’m ready to invest in yet another network, especially when I can do all this and more from my Google home page. It will be interesting to see how Google integrates all its great social features and web applications into one mobile OS. Something tells me this generation will be updating their social sites from their wireless devices on the go and not so much on their desktops.