Charitable Checkin Turns Your Good Deeds Into Rewards

Fake Tracy Morgan said it best on Twitter, courtesy of Bits &Pieces:

“Facebook asks what I’m thinking. Twitter asks what I’m doing. Foursquare asks where I am. The internet has turned into a crazy girlfriend.”

What fake Tracy is pointing out so eloquently is just the beginning. Another player has come into the space: dailyfeats. What’s different about this one is that there is more of a focus on social awareness or community consciousness. 

Users self-report good deeds and receive points, give and receive props to other users, and receive some discounts from advertiser supported feats. (So far, the advertiser/content fit has been good. Keeping my fingers crossed that it will remain that way.)

What makes this social network particularly interesting is that it attempts to tap into an idea that can sometimes be considered an oxymoron in the online world: ethics. Aristotle and Socrates more or less believed that people can and are willing to do good. This social network is taking that idea and is now attempting to allow us to do this online.

If I see that my friends are doing good works, then I should be more willing to do good works, too, right?

The Achilles heel for making this work is twofold: 1. Users need to self-report honestly about their good deeds and 2. Users need to be diligent about updating their good works.

As for the honesty, people will choose to be honest or not. No amount of policing can make all users online be honest, so I’ll let that be. As for the diligence part, that’s where I struggle.

Fundamentally, I am not interested in constantly recording what I’m thinking, doing, saying, eating, (insert verb here), etc. constantly online.

However, the temptation to show how “good” I am online is quite appealing.  Even if it can get me to be a little nicer even for a short period of time, I’m sure my husband would appreciate it. I can now check my “Be Kind” feat, yes!

The Fall of MySpace And The Rise of LinkedIn

Social networks are cool. They are so cool that I’m part of at least five of them.

The trouble with social networks is that they are fickle. What is popular in one moment is not necessarily popular in the next.

I’ll be honest. When I first joined Twitter in 2008, I wasn’t sure if it was going to take off. I actually don’t remember the original account name because I logged in once in 2008 and haven’t since. At the time, I thought that the “texting” like structure of Twitter wouldn’t work online. Given today’s date, I was wrong.

I came across an infographic about social media from Mashable, “The Winners & Losers of Social Networking”.

I think infographics are cool. They are so cool that I’m going to try to learn Adobe Illustrator. We’ll see how far I go.

I’m passing along this infographic because it’s cool and it combines two things I think are cool.

Social Media Identities

I am one person. Or at least in real life I am one person. Online I am two persons, sometimes three, sometimes more. The number of identities depends on the website/social network.

A recent article on GigaOM, “LinkedIn and Facebook: Personal vs. Professional in the Identity Wars,” by Mathew Ingram shed a light on a few things I’ve been noticing:

- Everyone is trying to be like Facebook.
- I have separate accounts for everything.

As for the Facebook phenomenon, it is what it is. Convergence and divergence is an eternal cycle, so it’s no surprise that user interfaces and functionality on social websites are beginning to look similar. Facebook is just lucky that their model is the winner, for today.

As for the separate accounts, it is true. I have a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook profile, several Blogger profiles, several Reddit profiles, and the list goes on. Part of the reason for the separation is that I don’t really want everyone at work to know everything about me personally and vice versa. For the people who know me personally, I wouldn’t want them to know me professionally. (Let’s just say I behave differently at work from at home.)

So if LinkedIn is trying to be more like Facebook, does this mean that our social digital identities are also converging? Digging deeper into the subject I came across some interesting research by MyWebCareer.com stating that roughly 23% of LinkedIn connections are also Facebook friends. (Press release here.) While the merits of research against a self-selecting panel of users can be debated elsewhere, the idea is interesting.

Conservatively speaking, 1 out of 5 people I “know” on LinkedIn, I also “know” on Facebook. So I’ve broken my cardinal rule, I’ve mixed professional and personal, business and pleasure. Is it so bad? I’m beginning to think not.

How often is the case that colleagues go out for drinks after work?

Or how often is it the case that colleagues with similar interests outside of work meet up on the weekends?

How about the cases where friends are freelancers, so friends offer to commission work from their friends to help them out?

The idea of self is complicated, and it changes over the course of a lifetime. So why not have my social digital identities mix a little bit? Afterall, I am the same person offline. So, now I just need to introduce my FLinkedInbook profile.