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Social Networking 2.0

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Not Just for Social Encounters

The term “social networking” brings to mind Web sites such as Bebo and MySpace, but the practice of making personal connections via the Internet is driving a wave of technological innovation through American companies and organizations. The new social networks don’t rely on advertising revenue and rediscovering childhood friends. They are being designed with specific purposes in mind, from fighting poverty to bringing political campaign supporters together. By thinking broadly about the applications of social networks, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and even political candidates are building connections in new and fascinating ways. Through the sites they are building, they are changing the nature of human interaction on the Internet.

Fighting Poverty

As a Microsoft employee running a lab in Bangalore, American Sean Blagsvedt became acutely aware of how lucky he was to have been born in a wealthy country. He decided to use his technological expertise to help India’s poor.

While reading about the causes of poverty, Blagsvedt found a study that showed that people got out of poverty by finding jobs. More than 70 percent of the time, they found these jobs through social connections. With this information, Blagsvedt developed the idea of connecting employees and employers through a computerized system, but he had to overcome the fact that most of the poor in India did not have access to technology.

So Blagsvedt developed Babajob, an Indian Web site that connects potential employees to employers. Blagsvedt and his team pay people who have computer access to sign up those who do not, which solves the problem of how to get job seekers into his database. It also creates a new kind of intermediary job based around social networks, where someone who is computer literate can make a living entering others into the database. Babajob is also working with Internet cafés and nongovernmental organizations to help build its pool of employment-seekers. Potential workers are then profiled on line, where employers can find them. The one requirement is that everyone who signs up must have access to a telephone, even if it belongs to a remote family member.

The Recycling Connection

When companies move, close, or downsize, they often have a lot of extra stuff. For Ken Kurtzig, that leftover stuff has become a booming green business based around the Web site iReuse.com. The iReuse site connects people with extra materials with those who need them, linking large companies including Adobe and Birkenstock with small, nonprofit organizations seeking donations of desks, fax machines, and the occasional fish pond.

There are three components to iReuse’s operation: the supply side, the demand side, and the technology that links them together. Essentially, both sides make lists. Suppliers list what they have to give away — everything from koi fish, cubicles, and office plants — and those seeking items create lists of what they need. The technology behind the Web site links them together. Kurtzig has developed a lot of propriety technology for the site, but he plans to release it for use by other nonprofit organizations.

Targeting Disaster Recovery

Inspired by the difficult response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in America’s Gulf Coast in 2005, Anand Kulkarni and Ephrat Bitton, two PhD students at the University of California-Berkeley, came up with the idea of creating a person-to-person marketplace for charitable giving. The two were working on ideas for using information technology systems to resolve social problems, and they felt that one of the saddest aspects of Katrina was that so many members of the public seemed willing to help, but there was little they could do. The result is iCare, which allows survivors of disasters to report their needs so that members of the public can donate the goods and services most required by those affected.

The iCare site is a Web application that synthesizes information from several existing databases on the Internet, including transportation providers, survivor needs databases, stockpiles of relief supplies, and commercial providers. The partially automated, decentralized response is designed to eliminate inefficiencies in disaster aid by routing aid along several different channels at once, which limits potential disruptions such as road outages and theft. Giving goods rather than money also eliminates the costs associated with running large organizations, so more of a donation reaches its intended recipient.

Campaigning: Information Go-To

Web sites are the go-to location for information on the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates, just as they were in 2004. But today, most candidates are also connecting to the public via well-known social networking sites: Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John Edwards, and Rudy Giuliani are all using the professional networking site LinkedIn.com to make their policies and views known.

Only one leading candidate, Barack Obama, has developed a social networking component for his or her own Web site. At http://my.barackobama.com, users can enter profile information, write blog entries, see personalized event information, network with friends, and earn points to measure the impact they are having on the campaign. According to campaign literature, more than 280,000 people have created accounts on barackobama.com, and these users have created more than 6,500 volunteer groups and have organized more than 13,000 events by using the Web site.

Links:

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Innovative Use of Online Networks Transforming Society