This will be the final post today - finally managed to clear the blogging backlog I accumulated just from going through all my feeds that I missed. Don't worry though, I've got more to write about
.
Social networks are popping up everywhere (even one of the presidential candidates for US in 2008 has
one), and personally, I don't really see the need sometimes, and most probably won't grow that much, but here's one I thought was worth writing about -
change.org [via
Read/Write Web].
While all the others are just about socialising,
this one is for people who are driven and want things to change. These people are passionate about their topic, and the people they connect with are likely to be similar, creating a strong bond to the site. Its also a great site to discover other causes as well, with a nice, big, prominent tag cloud in the centre of the home page. Apart from your usual social network features, there's also an 'actions' component, allowing you to state your actions, and create some sort of motivation to carry them out by having it publicly listed.
Another good one is
Kiva.org which connects those better off to those in 3rd world countries who need money to start a venture and hopefully get out of poverty. There are many different opportunities, and although it is mainly a donation scheme, donors do get some money back when the venture succeeds.
Somewhat off-topic, I found a site called
Zlango [via
TechCrunch],
which aims to use a language created completely from pictures. While it maybe cool and help traverse language barriers, it seems quite gimmicky, though cool.
And lastly, another off-topic discovery was
IMified [via
Mashable!]. Compatible with a range of popular web apps including
Remember The Milk and
Basecamp,
the premise of this is that you can get things done quicker by issuing commands to these web apps through your IM software. I'm not sold on the idea purely because I find I have enough things to remember already, without having to remember the various commands to communicate via my IM software. I'm much prefer a quick, slick, unintrusive desktop app that can be called up with a hotkey, or maybe a desktop widget.