Facebook Grows Up and Twitter Grows Large

We all know that Facebook has been growing rapidly, reaching 200 million global users earlier this month. It gave itself and the whole Internet community an interesting celebratory present by setting up Facebook for Good.It also made itself a celebratory video with an interesting heat map of the distribution of Facebook users. Note the high level of activity in the US on the east and west coasts and in urban centers around the globe.

Facebook has long had a cause app. If you take a look you quickly realize that Facebook is not a good place to raise money, although a lot of people clearly have good intentions. We all know, however, that it’s a place to reach out—if you do it right.

So Facebook set up a special page. In its own words:

we've partnered with 16 charity/advocacy groups who are making the world a better place. When you purchase one of these gifts, 90-95% of the cost will go to that organization to support its efforts.

On this page you can also share your stories about how Facebook has helped you to give back. I particularly liked the posting from Sri Lanka.

This is a different approach to charitable works than the Ashton Kutcher/CNN Twitter challenge. If you missed that one yesterday, the first to reach 1 million Twitter followers would donate 10,000 mosquito nets to world malaria day. Kutcher edged out CNN by only a couple of thousand followers (see his celebration party). It made for a fun day of live television and got CNN (as well as Kutcher, obviously) lots of new Twitter followers, including me. Why don’t you comment on Anderson Cooper’s blog (he seems to be the one who spend the most time promoting the challenge) and ask CNN to make its donation anyway—as several of us already have done.

That’s what Web 2.0 is all about. Intrusive advertising is out. Doing well by doing good is in!