It’s raining new websites for kids, and ZooKazoo is one of the newest in the shower. ZooKazoo is both a social network and a casual gaming site. It’s housed inside a safe environment that you enter with a subscription bought by parents.
At launch, ZooKazoo seems to suffer from a bit of the kitchen-sink disease. There ia a potpourri of different worlds and different metaphors in the site’s activities and games, which gives kids more than plenty to do, but feels a bit random.

There are two different worlds of play: a Jungle theme and a hip hop music scene, each with their own games. ZooKazoo is also launching special projects like one for Earth Day that will educate and entertain.

To begin your ZooKazoo adventure, you create a profile page that features your Zelf – a cute name for yourself. Your Zelf roams around ZooKazoo’s worlds, meeting up with friends, chatting, and exchanging Zmails.

Much like other recent social network launches with kids in mind, you win points as you play games. These points, called Kazoobits, can be used to spiff up your avatar with accessories and buy virtual homes in the ZooKazoo lands. There’s a charitable component as well, which asks kids to give away some of their Kazoobits. Finally, the company says it plans to offer creativity tools for making paintings, photo projects, and more online.

The environment is a rich one and overtime, but I think that kids are looking for characters to identify with and games that really fit the virtual world that they’re in.