Greenpeace

Today Greenpeace soft launched its "Personal Activist Network". Now you can go through the blogs and student area and invite people into your network. For the time being that just means that you can see their blog posts in the Friends panel of your login page, but there will be more sharing features added soon. I've also added a "Member Home" link to the top of most member center pages so you can get back to the page that you see after login that gives you all of the blogging, action, and discussion options/icons. So keep up with your fellow activists' blog posts with the new social networking feature. And a big thanks to all of you for making this such a lively community.

Today I added the ability to "show more posts" at the bottom of the recent or most talked about member posts. That way if you don't come to the site everyday you can still catch up on what people are talking about. Also coming down the road is the Personal Activist Network, where you can invite your friends and like-minded activists into your personal network and contact them about events and such. Greenpeace social networking, here we come.

I posted a video to the students site today that people should really take a look at if they want to be reminded what Greenpeace is about. It's sort of a music video with imagery of Greenpeace actions over the years set to the song "You've Got the Music in You" by the New Radicals. Check it out here.

Ok, I have to say it, the students website that is just about to be unveiled to the general public is turning into a really interesting Greenpeace project.  If you are a student you should definitely check it out now here.

 You can create your school, join other schools, and any blog posts from school members show up on that school's page.  Eventually there will be more organizing tools for each school, but this is just the foundational 1.0 release.  So sign up, invite some friends, and keep track of what is happening in the environmental activist community on your campus with the Greenpeace students site and blogs.

 The most interesting part of how people have been using this tool so far is all of the high schools and high school students who have been getting involved.  Around 25% of the schools are high schools, even though the goal of this project was to organize college campuses.  Kids are smarter than then get credit for I guess.

I'm still not sure how far Greenpeace should go into the realm of social networking.  MySpace is great is some ways, but it stinks in others.  If there could be a socially responsible MySpace-like alternative at members.greenpeace.org that would be great, but how to avoid the "Top 8" mentality and popularity contests?  One idea might be to do away with "friends" and just use "groups" instead.  But then it makes it hard to control who can send you messages and who can't.  I'm thinking about it.  Any examples out there that I should see?  Any social networking features that you can't live without? 

 So it be.