Dan Blake from Harkness Labs – who is working on far more projects at the same time than he could possibly tell me about in just one conversation – recently filled me in on his latest Twitter-related venture, TinyPetition.
Basically, Blake is looking to address the apparent need for a tool that allows the many opinionated people that inhabit Twitterland to voice their concerns about anything that gets their hearts pumping: a digital petition engine that can quickly spread online thanks to the viral nature of Twitter and the concept of retweeting in particular.
We’ve already seen Twitition pop up, most recently for aggregating opinions from Twitter users on the iPhone 3G S upgrade prices AT&T is going to charge. So far, that service has racked up 41800 signatures for 730 topics. TinyPetition, in contrast, has only soft-launched its website so far and stands at about 5800 signatures for only 5 petitions. Still, Blake thinks he can eventually overtake Twitition, which prompts the question how he intends to do so.
Well for one, Blake has access to an existing user base of millions he could potentially draw from, as he also happens to be the guy behind this website called PetitionSpot, one of the most popular online petition services in the world. It’s a good start: PetitionSpot boasts about 4 million registered users (although Blake says it’s more like 2 million who have actively shared petitions since the site’s inception) and these are all people who have already expressed their interest in signing digital petitions, obviously. We’ll see how far this gets TinyPetition further down the line.
I’ve set up a test petition (unsurprisingly, about our quest to have Facebook management reconsider their policy on Holocaust denial groups), which you can find at tinypetition.com/facebookholocaust. Here’s my tweet about it, which I’ve shared from the TinyPetition website (something seems to have gone wrong with it).
Neat idea! I think there are two tweaks that could make this a bit more useful
1. Tying this up with verified accounts. A petition with qualified signees counts for a lot more than one full of unattributable pseudonyms .
2. Have a way of tying the petitions with a counter-petition, so that for example if I see somebody promoting a petition that I am actually opposed to, I can go and sign for the other side. Obviously this only really makes sense in the case of issues where there is some kind of binary choice – but in most cases there will be (change the status quo vs not).
Really is that all?
I found a website http://tweetjunction.com that beats twitpic, twitgoo and any other twitter related content sharing site in the world.
You can tweet from this site directly to twitter using their Tweet It Box!, you can share blogs, discussions, pics, videos, events, and more using their unique Tweet It! button.
They are working on integration of auctions into the website and a ton of other features.
I expect tweetjunction.com to be the right hand of twitter someday.
Wake up people…. one site a million things to do!
Can anyone help me…
My gmail account got hacked, and by the ‘Activity Log’ feature of Google, I could figure out the IP address from where my email account was logged in.
The IP was 204.15.23.171
I do not know how to figure out which browser is this. Is there any software that can figure out whose machine is this where my account was opened and emails were tampered?
How to track down this hacker with IP 204.15.23.171 ?
I guess no one wanted to comment?
Cool.
Facebook has reconsidered it, and engaged in conversation.
They just have not changed their minds.
Only one problem: online petitions are a joking exercise of self-stimulation.
I’m hoping this was a sponsored post?
sweet!
Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life.
KZ
Try http://www.tweetmarch.com