Whether you’re flipping channels on TV or walking around town on the weekend, it’s clear to see there’s a movement happening. Commercials, websites, Facebook applications and people – everywhere – are in pink in support of people affected by breast cancer.

Many of us have been touched by the stories of people affected by cancer. With the advent of social media and social technology, connecting with survivors, discovering a community for support and fundraising online has never been easier.

A perfect example? The Tic Tac: Shake, Share & Care app on Facebook.

The app has two main functions, the first is to share how you’ve helped or cared for someone affected by cancer. Upon submission, your act of sharing will automatically donate $5 to CancerCares, care of Tic Tac.

Secondly, you’re invited to play a game of memory. The game encourages players to challenge their friends. That one action also invites people to share their own stories, thereby increasing Tic Tac’s donation tally – smart!

With this application, Tic Tac is offering a great example of how social technology can be used by brands as a vehicle for social good. We recommend visiting their application now, and sharing your own story. It’s hard to believe that one simple action can amount to so much.

Go on – inspire people who have been affected by cancer. Make a difference.

If you have two minutes instead of just one, please donate your extra minute to vote for both of Invoke’s SXSW panels, which address topics relevant to the subject at hand.

1. Creating Corporate Campaigns on Facebook – WTF?
2. Discovering Lady Kind in the Social Web

Thanks!

Part one of a two part series focusing on Facebook’s API and using it to create Facebook applications for brands.

When Facebook first released their API and developer platform, it was a big step for companies trying to leverage the capabilities of social networks.  Developers could “easily” build on top of the Facebook platform, submit it to their application directory, and suddenly a simple application is a click away from millions of users.  Take this model, apply it to mobile applications and it sounds awfully similar to the successful iPhone app marketplace.  It sounds easy enough but it’s another thing to execute and keep developers happy.  The success of Facebook’s developer platform was not as simple as creating a public API and a centralized area for listings.  Facebook needs to ensure the barriers to entry are low and road maps are communicated properly.

So, what has Facebook done to ensure a high adoption rate for application development?  The one aspect that is overlooked with the release of an API is the “platform”.  As a developer, to me the developers platform is more than an API, it includes features like: official forums, support groups, ticketing systems, standard news releases, and sample libraries in common programming languages.  If Facebook had just released the API documentation it’s unlikely as many companies would have adopted Facebook development.

From a developer’s perspective, Facebook has been a leader in providing a real platform for 3rd party application development.  The first thing most developers do when they want to learn a new tool is download the “sample code”.  This is usually followed by reading up on the documentation and then asking questions.  When a new API or tool does not have working sample code, documentation and an official forum, the barriers to entry become too high.  This results in higher costs for development which ultimately makes the adoption rate very low.  From the start, Facebook provided working sample code, documentation with examples, and an official forum.  All of these elements together have helped create a strong developer community.

While the Facebook platform is great, there is a “dark side” with the API.  The one word that can sum up the major pain point for the Facebook API is “change” or “deprecation”.  When an API feature is “deprecated”, that means it has the potential to become dated and could be removed down the road.  Facebook has an interesting methodology on removing and releasing new features.  They usually offer forewarning when a feature is about to be removed, but there is no backwards support for older versions.  You cannot build an Facebook app for the API from last year, it needs to work with the API from today and the one coming in a few months.  The only exception is right now with the newly launched Graph API.  Currently, canvas applications should be built using the older REST API as the Graph API does not support all features… yet.

As frustrating as this can be for development, in the short and long run I think it’s a smart approach for the Facebook platform.  Aside from saving development time on Facebook’s side, it forces companies to evaluate their applications at all times to ensure it’s utilizing all the newest features.  The only major downside is cost and time, as every Facebook application has to be updated constantly.

The value from developing Facebook applications is well worth the work involved with maintenance and API changes.  With a few lines of code, you can tap into API features that update user walls, news feeds, and status.

Part two of this series will offer a case study that highlights the process of achieving that fine balance: using the latest offerings from Facebook’s API and doing so in a way that can also be maintained for future revisions down the road.

Posted by Saleem Barnard

* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity

In the past ten years or so, I have worked on, or been presented with, dozens of online business ideas. From real estate to horses, hot sauce to social networking, they all share one thing in common: they started with an idea. What differs, however, is where the inspiration came from. One common formula I tend to see is the “me too – but different” syndrome. I’ll make facebook but for: fish, cats, seniors, small people, big people, beautiful people.

The core social networking sites, such as Myspace and Facebook, benefited from a first to market strategy. Myspace isn’t particularity a good site: the usability is lacking, the design is no more than functional, and user customizing has led to slow and annoying user experiences (such as waiting for an animated background to load along with a music file). All of those aforementioned points are thrown out the window by the fact that Myspace has reached mainstream acceptance.

This is not to discourage any spin-off idea from entering the execution stage. Facebook proved that a superior product can outplay an established core. Just don’t abandon the principles of business; Is there a need and market for the product? Is this need being met? What are the opportunities and threats in the market? For myself, I know my fish could benefit from making a few online friends. Or maybe not.

Posted by Jenn Lowther

I have a confession to make. I <3 twitter. For those of you who don’t know what twitter is, it’s basically a micro blogging platform. You get 140 characters to say whatever you want. You add friends – creating your own social network and let them know what you are doing through your status updates. If you want to read more about twitter, you can find more info here.

The way I am currently interacting with twitter is reminiscent of when I first signed up for facebook – way back in February 2007. I am currently adding new friends, obsessively reading the different feeds, and checking out all of the new 3rd party applications that are starting to trickle out (Rebecca did a great post covering some of the twitter apps and clients). But, there are some major problems that I – and the twitter community in general – have been encountering, that just wasn’t there when facebook first opened up to the public.

The first – and most significantly – is the large amount of downtime. twitter doesn’t seem able to scale their service to deal with the recent large onslaught of users. Recently, it appears that twitter has hit a tipping point, it is no longer a fringe social networking site. The users have been fairly patient with twitter whilst they’ve been trying to sort this out. But lately, it has become much worse and fans (and users) of the site have started to get upset over this persistent issue. Today, Valleywag wrote an article titled ‘twitter outages inspire truly awful videos‘. twitter’s users, for the most part, are very tech and social media savvy and it appears that more than one user has decided to turn their displeasure into pretty funny and awful videos. Make sure you check out the singing guy – it’s funny. And the best thing about this is that when twitter decided to work, we twittered the video’s and article.

There is also a huge problem with signal to noise ratio on twitter, but you can deal with that by being selective about who you befriend on the site. I’ve noticed lately though that the signal is really starting to outweigh the noise from the users themselves, but that probably has more to do with being selective in who I add rather than an overall change in the signal to noise ratio. Also, there has recently been an onslaught of bots on the site automatically adding friends so that they can spam them. Real users have sorted out the initial signal to noise issues…and we are happy for that. But if this spam starts to become prevalent on the site, there will be some serious issues that they will have to sort out.

Finally – twitter thinks of itself as a communication tool rather than a social network. There has recently been a big uproar over twitter’s TOS and how they’ve dealt with harassment on the site. I’m not going to cover the whole situation, you can find great coverage of the issue here and Collen wrote a great open letter to twitter on how they need to deal with the issue. twitter needs to figure out who they are. The site is not just another IM client and the users I know don’t treat it as one. We are a community whether they like it or not. The only question is whether they are going to embrace this and encourage us or are they going to continue in the path that they’ve headed, alienating us and driving us to another site?

If twitter wants to become the next facebook – which in my opinion, they are poised to do – they need to address the issues outlined above. Like I said, I <3 twitter, but there are tons of alternatives out there for us to use – pownce, jaiku, plurk, just to name a few, so twitter need to get their act together so they don’t lose the early adopters – who are their biggest and most vocal advocates.

Posted by Jenn Lowther

Since facebook opened their social networking site to the public in September 2006 (prior to this, you had to be attending a US University), it has become a resounding success. Currently, there are 63 million active users on facebook and it has grown at an astonishing rate of 125% per year. I’ve been on facebook since January 2007 and have found it to be a great source for connecting with my friends and organizing events.

In May 2007, facebook opened their platform to developers to create applications that users could add to their profiles. This brought an onslaught of zobmie bites, sheep tossing, what’s your stripper name, and applications of similar ilk. But through the noise, there was some great applications that were developed. Some were useful in sharing your interests to your friends, like ilike. There are also applications that allow you to support and raise money for your favorite charities.

The most popular of these is the Causes application. Causes has registered 12 million users, with 95,886 daily active users, who are now supporting more than 80,000 non-profit causes worldwide. $2.5 million has been raised for 19,445 different 501(c)(3) charitable organizations.

I’ve had the causes application on my profile for close to a year now, and I am supporting: Invisible Children – who have raised $21,220 through facebook, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) who have raised $6,321 through facebook, and my new one Team Diabetes Easter Island. This is a great way to let your friends know what causes are dear to you, and if so inclined, to help support your cause. Other charitable organizations have seen the resounding success of causes and have started to develop applications to help drive awareness and social consciousness.

Invoke in conjunction with Lochmaddy Foundation and Lundin For Africa is working with Kiva to help them develop an application to help raise awareness and funds to help support their cause. Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepeneurs in the developing world.

The facebook Kiva application lets a user grow their funds by using the facebook platform as a means of soliciting friends for monetary contributions. The Kiva Facebook application has 2 core features including one that simply isn’t available to Kiva users outside of this application.

• New users can create accounts, browse businesses, loan, and track their loans just like they can on the Kiva.org site.
• We have a new feature that allows passionate users to solicit contributions to a large pool of funds for a single user to manage. This creates a scenario where people who think Kiva is an excellent service but dont necessarily have the time to manage an account can still make a difference. It also allows for many many small donations to be pooled and have a huge impact. These managed accounts will be non-withdrawable.

Also, the application increases the brand awareness of Kiva by posting news feeds when specific actions occur. The end result is that a Kiva user can lend to more entrepreneurs and non-Kiva users can contribute without having to having to manage their own funds.

The Kiva facebook application is set to launch in mid to late June. I know that this will be an application that I will add to my facebook so that I can do my small part in raising awareness and funds to this worthwhile cause.

I think that this move towards social responsibility reflects the need and desire of our generation to get involved and help make the world a better place. Today, it is easier than ever to get your voice heard and get involved in organizations that matter to you. Facebook is just one avenue for this and I think that these charitable applications make up for every zombie/vampire bite and sheep toss I received.