Innovation
17 January 2008
Social Networking 2.0
By Jessica Hilberman
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.
What makes Babajob unique among networking companies, Blagsvedt says, is that it uses “financial and social incentives to encourage a behavior that is good, namely getting poor people hired.” Though Babajob has been around for only a few months, the idea has gone global. Blagsvedt has received e-mails from people who want to use his technology to implement the idea in the United States, Mexico, Peru, and the United Kingdom as a way to get workers from Eastern Europe integrated into the economy.
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.
The benefits are manifold. There’s a social benefit because organizations that cannot afford new materials are connected to those that have things they need to give away. Kurtzig says that when an administrator at a school creates a wish list of items the school needs, iReuse’s technology can match those needs with companies that have surplus items. “Prior to iReuse,” Kurtzig says, nonprofits “would get things dumped on them, and 50 percent of it they didn’t want. With our wish lists, people only get or take what they want.”
There’s also a huge environmental benefit because the excess does not go into landfills. Rather than creating waste, materials are recycled.
Finally, for the large donor companies involved, there’s a financial benefit because they don’t have to pay for waste disposal. Corporate iReuse clients, says Kurtzig, are looking to save money, time, and the environment. By connecting them directly to the organizations that can reuse their waste, iReuse supports both for-profit and nonprofit companies.
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.
“There was a truly massive willingness on the part of the public to personally contribute to relief efforts in any way they could, but few mechanisms for doing so,” says Kulkarni about Katrina. Watching the people who drove to New Orleans to volunteer and contribute and the multitude of people who began to coordinate through Web sites for shelter and employment, Kulkarni and Bitton saw that people wanted to help in ways that went beyond writing a check. This situation led the pair to create iCare — a network designed for people to help each other and to eliminate fraud and corruption in the process.
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.
It is also possible for users to present policy ideas through text or video uploads. While other candidates, including Fred Thompson and Hillary Clinton, have blogs and event-finders on their Web pages, the Obama site’s “dashboard” system echoes successful social networking sites such as MySpace, allowing supporters to send each other messages through the site’s network. As part of Obama’s technology policy, he advocates deploying a high-tech, modern communications infrastructure. He started with his own campaign Web site.
Jessica Hilberman is a writer and editor who has published widely on the subjects of technology, health, popular culture, and urban issues. She lives in Northern California.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
