The company – not to be confused with Good Technology – is also consolidating several of its brands (Reason Pictures, GOOD Magazine and GOOD Digital) under a single entity dubbed GOOD Worldwide.

In addition to the funding, GOOD is living up to its promise to help ‘push the world forward’ by striking several strategic partnership and investment agreements. These include deals with Causes, a hugely popular Facebook and MySpace app that promotes viral donations of time and money to charities and non-profit organizations, Goodrec (a personal inspiration and recommendation service) and Govit, an application that empowers citizens to take action by connecting with their elected representatives in the United States.

Founded in 2006, GOOD says its website, which is partly a network of blogs, now reaches over 2 million monthly uniques while its magazine gets into the hands of approximately two hundred thousand readers. The media company also organizes well-attended live events and produces videos that it claims have been streamed over 25 million times to date.

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Sean Parker

Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications.

As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete with, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward.

Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes, one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund. He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook.

Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago.

Mr. Parker joins George Zachary, Keith Rabois, Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni, and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The latter two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively.

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I don’t have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is.

Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000.

Charity:Water’s accountability and simplicity of purpose has made it a popular charity in New York, Hollywood and increasingly the Valley.  Here’s the value proposition: One-out-of-six-people on the planet doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. $5,000 buys an African village a well. Every dime you donate, goes to these wells. You can even watch the wells being tapped for the first time via Web video. The non-profit is turning three in a few weeks, and it’s raised more than $10 million over that time—much of it in $20 increments from a base of some 60,000 donors. It was Obama-fundraising-math before that was invented. As a result some 700,000 people in the world now have access to clean drinking water.

It was all started three years ago when Scott Harrison, reformed bad boy and Charity:Water founder, asked people to come to a huge New York party for his September birthday and donate $20 at the door instead of giving him a gift. He raised $15,000 and built six wells in Uganda. (They were cheaper than the wells Charity:Water usually builds because three were shallow wells and three were rehabs of existing wells.) Like any great accidental entrepreneur, Harrison knew he was on to something.

In addition to all kinds of creative fund raising, detailed in the video below, the following year, Harrison opened his birthday to everyone via the Web, asking them to donate $32 dollars, since it was his 32 birthday. That year, he raised $59,000 and other September birthday babies brought the total to $150,000, which went to wells in Kenya. Not bad, but they had to HTML hand-code each participant’s site. Pretty laborious work for a small non-profit.

The next year he got more September babies to “give up” their birthdays, and a company called InspEnv.com built them a site, but it wasn’t hugely social or scalable. Still 800 people “gave up” their birthdays and raised some $965,000 dollars to bring some 50,000 people clean water in Ethiopia.

But Harrison knew that the value of a lot of micro-giving campaigns like Kiva and the popular Facebook application, Causes, is rooted in the ability to make small donations super-easy to solicit and to make via existing online social graphs. He was trying to figure out sites that knew when a huge number of people’s birthdays were and after MySpace and Facebook, he came across Bebo. Early last year, he cold-emailed Bebo founder Michael Birch to ask if he’d be willing to send a note out to his September born users and Birch wrote back that it was “a bad time.” It was actually a great time for Birch—he was selling the company to AOL for $850 million.

Once the deal was done, Birch called Harrison and suggested he build him a site that could help people born in any month instantly “give up their birthdays” for Charity:Water’s mission. It was fitting since Birch’s next project was his pre-Bebo project, a site called Birthday Alarm. Nine months later, Harrison is about to turn 34, Charity:Water is turning three, and Birch has finished the site. For a free project, it’s a pretty nice looking site.

The recession makes this perfect timing. If you’re panicked about money and job loss, giving up your birthday is an easy way to give to those less-fortunate without having to spend a dime yourself. My husband has a September birthday and has already signed up. I plan to sign up for my birthday in December. You can create your own campaign in a matter of moments and with a few clicks, share it via all your existing social networks.

I’m sure the coders who were up until 4 a.m. last night will have mixed feelings about this, but this is one time I really want to see TechCrunch users break a beta site.

[Photo credit: Scott Harrison]

The story of charity: water – The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.

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And it’s possible that this idea could work even better on Twitter, given the built-in viral nature of the service. Basically, each week on Thursday, TwitCause has a new cause they support. They ask that you follow the TwitCause Twitter account and then retweet the cause to show your support for it. These tweets contain a link to go back to the site where you can find a place to donate money if you choose to, using PayPal. The number of retweets and the money raised so far are all shown in real-time on the page, as are the most recently tweets about the cause.

The service launched today with the The V Foundation as its launch partner. The V Foundation is a hugely successful cancer research organization named after the late, great basketball coach Jim Valvano. With his foundation attached, TwitCause has already seen tweets go out from several official accounts of NBA and WNBA teams. The hope is to get other high profile athletes like Shaq and Lance Armstrong involved and tweeting throughout the week too.

Going forward, followers of the TwitCause account will be able to nominate other nonprofits and causes that they want want to see supported by the service. Armstrong’s Livestrong is currently leading the pack for the next cause. TwitCause is also hoping that businesses and brands will want to get involved to sponsor causes as well, matching tweets with dollar amounts in support.

As I said, the viral nature of the retweet seems to lend itself well to something like this. Plenty of other sites and services have used Twitter to help raise money or awareness for good causes, such as Blame Drew’s Cancer, which we covered a couple months ago. They are now also working with Livestrong and have seen over 20,000 tweets blame things on Drew’s cancer in support of the cause.

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Causes co-founder Joe Green writes on the site’s blog that the community currently stands at 70 million users, who are supporting 270,000 different causes and 53,000 nonprofits. Monetary donations have come from a total of 192,000 different users, with an impressive average donation size of $25.

Causes also highlights a few of the site’s best performers: Birthday Wish, which allows users to ask their friends to donate to a Cause of their choice in honor of their birthday, has raised a total of $1.4 million.

Causes also details a few examples showing just how far $10 million can go:

Clean drinking water for 50,000 people for 20 years
1 million bed nets to stop the spread of malaria
Safe, private shelter for 10,000 refugee families of five
First-time internet access for 100,000 low-income households
50,000 baskets of baby chickens for families in Cameroon

For more, be sure to check out the Causes blog.

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Writing letters to elected officials and government organizations is a time-old part of political activism. More recently, citizens had the option of using email vs. snail mail to send out correspondence. Now, citizens will have the opportunity to send letters and messages to elected officials directly from Facebook. Bi-partisan Political and digital strategy firm Grassroots Enterprise has launched an technology, called “Actions,” that organizations can use on Facebook to allow supporters and visitors to send messages and letters to elected officials or other targets directly from Facebook.

The Actions tab on an organization’s Facebook page will let visitors immediately send letters to Federal or state officials and will automatically match them to federal and state legislative officials, based on the addresses they enter. One of the other important functions of Actions is its ability to capture names and emails in an external database for later emails and fundraising. Grassroots Enterprise says the beauty of the Actions offering is the ability to for users to interact with the technology without having to download a separate application. And the “Actions” page is customizable for individual pages, enabling organizations to feature their own actions for their specific causes.

One of the first Action tabs Grassroots launched was for the “Confirm Sotomayor” effort on Facebook. The organization reports that in the first two days, the Facebook page had over 2,000 action takers. Grassroots says that they are going to be unrolling Actions pages for a variety of Faceboook pages, including the Sierra Club’s page, and a “pro-hockey” effort in Canada that’s trying to create another professional team.

Actions is similar in theory to Causes, a popular Facebook application that lets users support and donate to non-profits, causes and individuals. But for now, Actions is focused on helping movements with correspondence to spur action and harvest emails. Investors of Grassroots Enterprise include Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois.

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This morning you likely woke up to a flurry of nearly identical messages in your Facebook News Feed prompting you to get out and vote – the result of what may have been largest unified online statement ever as nearly 1 million Facebook members simultaneously changed their status messages. The effort was put together by Causes, the altruistic Facebook and MySpace application, which asked Facebook users to “donate” their status messages in the hopes of getting more of their friends to the polls.

The response to the application has been remarkable: the campaign went live on Thursday night, and had nearly 1 million users by the time last night’s message was sent out at midnight PST. The current tally stands at over 1.5 million users, who have posted over 4.5 million status messages in total (in addition to last night’s midnight rally, users have the choice of issuing more frequent status updates). You can still sign up if you’d like to send out reminders throughout the rest of the evening. Users have the choice of promoting their favorite candidate or proposition, or just sending out a generic message telling friends to get out and vote.

Causes President Joe Green says that while the Online Rally was built solely to prompt users to head to the polls, similar campaigns could also potentially applied to other altruistic missions (like stopping the genocide in Darfur). And while Causes may have purely benevolent motives in mind with putting on the Online Rally, they’re not coming away empty handed: everyone who signed up to donate their status message also installed the Causes Facebook app.

Finally, as if you needed another reminder, GO VOTE. Seriously.

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The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we’ll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST.

Facebook’s press release is here.

Live Coverage

In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated “I wish I knew” when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted that Facebook is working on launching improved search, but they aren’t close to launching it yet.

2:49 PM: That’s it. The show is over.

2:48 PM: Great Apps can integrate with users just like native Facebook apps, and they get early access to features. The Great Apps program is in alpha stage and the first two partners are iLike and Causes. There will be a strong enforcement system with all apps, and they will disable apps that are a problem. Over the last year they’ve disabled apps for violation of privacy or other policies. They take this very seriously, he says.

2:47 PM: The second announcement is the Facebook Great Apps Program (Top Tier program). They embody all ten of the guiding principles, and they advance the mission of Facebook.

2:46 PM: They’re announcing two new programs: a verification program is first – this is the lower tier of the two programs. Starting in September they will invite apps that are secure, respectful and transparent to apply to be verified. Trusted apps get a special badge in the directory and app page. (we posted on this earlier, here)

2:44 PM: They have partnerships with partners to help developer (Microsoft), host and scale. They are launching a new developer website that gives all the information needed for a quick start. He says 1000 apps have been submitted to the Facebook fund. They are revealing the names of fbFund’s recipients to date: Challenge, ConnectedWeddings, Podclass, MyListo, Trazzler, Zimride, LuckyCal, Coursefeed, Hotberry, and J2Play.

They are announcing a new competition today. $2M will be given out over the next two months. Facebook will select 25 finalists who will each get 25k. Users will vote on finalists who will each get 250k.

2:43 PM: He says they must keep the ecosystem safe for users and fair for developers. A year ago equal distribution became overwhelming to users, then they made restrictive changes that hurt apps. Going forward they will have different rules. They are announcing several programs to help app developers. Get Started Quickly tools like adding easy FBML tags.

2:42 PM: He says that they’ve learned a lot in the last year, as they’ve had lots of challenges. Facebook is listening to the community. They’re trying to partner more closely with developers. He says they are making organizational changes that let developers incorporate feedback during the dev process, and they’re creating full time community management organization

2:40 PM: “Security is a big part of it, apps can’t share information with other users unless they obey privacy settings. Apps must also be respectful of the users attention and time. Don’t make users invite 20 friends before you use the app, or spam friends without them knowing. Apps must be very transparent. Users should get what they expect when they click, not an interstitial ad. Design is also important – clean design is a must. And apps must be fast loading and responsive. As the apps get faster, users use them more. Apps need to focus on being robust and scaling properly as they grow.”

2:39 PM: “Building trustworthy applications is important because we live in an ecosystem with network effects. If users leave, everyone suffers. Apps must be safe and trusted.”

2:37 PM: He says apps must be useful. The carpool app is great example, which lets users find carpool buddies. “Apps must also be expressive”- The graffiti app that lets users draw on friends profiles, is a good example. Finally, meaningful apps must be engaging. He says Playfish makes games that are highly engaging. Facebook users have played over 900 million minutes of Playfish games. That’s about 1800 years.

2:35 PM: Benjamin is announcing “guiding principles for great applications” which are based on dialog with community. It’s based on three pillars: meaningful, trustworthy and well designed. The best apps make use of the social graph. Applications must be social. A good example is the Lil Green Patch app, which helps users fight global warming by interacting with other users.

2:33 PM: Benjamin Ling, Director of Platform Program Management is now on stage talking about the “State of Platform.” He says that over $200m has been invested in Facebook apps, $34m this week alone. Additionally, 13 different ad networks have launched that pay out tens of millions of dollars to app developers. He says, “venture capital, ad networks, developers and academics are the ecosystem that makes Facebook platform a success.”

2:32 PM: Mark wraps things up, that appears to be the end of the announcements.

2:31 PM: Zuckerberg asked all Facebook employees who work on platform to stand up, then asked all app developers to stand up.

2:29 PM: “Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” – Facebook’s mission statement

2:28 PM: To recap, he’s talked about new profiles and the highlighting of the news feed, the second item is Facebook Connect. The new profile launched Monday, he says. Facebook Connect will launch developer keys starting today – there will be a beta period.

2:26 PM: That’s it for launch partners. Mark is back on stage.

2:25 PM: A new site will have a “my friends” tab that shows reviews by friends in various cities.

2:23 PM: Mike Philips from Citysearch is taking the stage. He says they are launching a new site, where sharing information is a big piece. They are integrating with Facebook Connect. When a user looks for a hotel, restaurant, etc., Citysearch already has lots of reviews and data, but not a way to link up reviews from friends.

2:22 PM: When you login to comment, users can sign in via Movable Type or Facebook. If you sign in with Facebook, it will display changes – light blue boxes outline your friend’s comments.

2:20 PM: David Recordon from Six Apart just took the stage. They are releasing a plugin for Movable Type that allows people to comment using their Facebook profiles. Users can decide to profiles or keep them private.

2:17 PM: Digg is now allowing people to sign into Digg via Facebook or OpenID. There is no requirement to sign up for a Digg account.

2:15 PM: Launch partners are now coming on stage. First up is Digg by Joe Stump.

2:13 PM: Facebook Connect can show you which of your Facebook friends are also on the outside service, so you can link up with them there too. They are also allowing people to leave comments and requests on third party sites.

2:12 PM: Facebook Connect will let applications share data with Facebook. Users can bring Facebook friends with them to outside sites.

2:11 PM: Mark is now talking about Facebook Connect.

2:10 PM: He says he wants Facebook to be the platform and tools provider, but let apps do anything social they want.

2:08 PM: Mark says we are going to see the decentralization of social networking into apps on the web. Things will decentralize further, apps can run anywhere on the web, not just on social network platforms. They will all work together, just be decentralized.

2:05 PM: People (including us) are writing wall posts for Mark since he has his profile live on stage, but it looks like he’s actually using a fake profile, it shows just 8 friends.

2:03 PM: Mark is now showing a live demo of the new home page.

2:02 PM: Mark says they haven’t completely gotten rid of app boxes, they’re added a tab for them. Some apps really need them. Users can also add tabs for individual apps.

1:59 PM: He says the apps that leverage the news feed the best will be the ones that succeed.

1:58 PM: “The most important part of the profile is the wall and the news feed, which have now been merged. They also give developers an incentive to build apps that let users share a lot of information. This is a lot better than an application box, which people don’t interact with as much.”

1:56 PM: Mark is now talking about the new profile pages and how it fits in with their current goals.

1:54 PM: Mark says that over the last year Facebook hasn’t done enough to reward applications that provide a lot of long term value, and they haven’t punished the ones abusing the system.

1:53 PM: Mark is talking about lessons Facebook has learned. He says that they released the platform as quickly as possible, it wasn’t fully baked yet, and they didn’t anticipate the huge adoption.

1:52 PM: Mark says the most powerful tool on Facebook today is the News Feed. Traffic went up by 50% when they first launched news feed in late 2006.

1:51 PM: Mark is now talking about the social graph, a concept he introduced at the first f8 conference.

1:49 PM: LivingSocial just announced they received $5M in Funding, Flixster received $6M from Allen and Company, and Zynga got $29M from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Zuckerberg says, “There has been more than $200 million invested in the ecosystem.”

1:47 PM: David Glazer (Director of Engineering, Friend Connect) is here in the audience (which is about 1500 people), it looks like he will announce something. Perhaps they are announcing some kind of agreement.

1:45 PM: “We’re opening up the translation tool to allow apps to be translated as well…We now have more than 400k developers building on top of the platform. The developer community is spread around the world. More than half are outside of the US.

1:43 PM: Mark is now talking about opening up Facebook for translations made by users. They started with Spanish and French, and now the site is available in over 60 languages.

1:41 PM: Mark is looking back over the last year and says it’s been pretty crazy. Over 24 million people were using Facebook a year ago – today they are at 90 million people.

1:38 PM: Mark says its time to take the Facebook platform to the next level. On a recent vacation he realized (1) they want to build a product that really lets you connect with people, and (2) they want to extend the concept of presence, have more open connections and share more. They want to make the world a more open place

“The most important information is only available if people share it, and have the power and the tools to do so”

1:35 PM: Mark takes the stage and welcomes the crowd.

1:30 PM: Still waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to take the stage.

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Today is definitely Facebook day as they hold their second annual F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Last year they released their developer platform, which led competitors to hurriedly release their own competing offerings. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’ve made our predictions, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at 1:30 to make his keynote, and workshops will follow all day after that. The full schedule is here.

Some of the news is breaking early. For example, we will almost certainly see the Facebook payments platform launch in some form, for example – Facebook desperately wants to find a way to help application developers make money beyond advertising, and the iPhone App Store has shown that people are willing to pay for quality applications.

Even more certain is the launch of Facebook Connect, which will allow third party services to authenticate Facebook users and merge profile data into their offerings. Digg will be one of their launch partners, and will show off the new product on stage, say our sources. However, neither CEO Jay Adelson or Founder Kevin Rose will attend the event.

We’ve also heard from sources that Facebook will announce a tiering system for applications, confirming our previous post in March. Five to ten top tier apps, which have proven themselves trustworthy and which create as good or better a user experience as what Facebook is able to create itself, will be named in the near future. iLike (music) and Causes (charity) will be announced tomorrow, and more will come soon. We heard that Flixster (movies) was on the short list but was bumped at the last minute – perhaps due to their MySpace partnership announced yesterday.

Other apps will be grouped into a middle tier, where most of them will fall, and a bottom “unwashed masses” tier for untrustworthy or spammy apps that have little user value. Each tier will have different rules for engaging with users, particularly around invites, messaging and entry into the news feed.

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The company says they’ve registered 12 million 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. Facebook reports 60,000 daily users of the application, and MySpace reports 25,000.

Causes was founded by Joe Green and Sean Parker. Sean, a partner at Founders Fund , previously co-founded Napster, was the founding President of Facebook, and co-founded the recently acquired Plaxo. His goal with Causes, he told me last year when the company was called Project Agape, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.

So far, so good.

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The intent founders, which include Deepak Chopra’s daughter Mallika Chopra as well as Sarah Ross and Sal Taylor Kydd, will aim to fill a niche between lifestyle sites and medical properties – a destination for wellness content, a syndication platform, and a branded hub for people seeking to share their intentions (personal, social, spiritual and environmental). The site will include original content from wellness category luminaries, medical professionals, media personalities, and pop culture icons. They aren’t willing to disclose much more for now.

The company has raised under “less than $1 million” in an angel round of financing that included Richard Wolpert and other unnamed investors. The Intent blog is here.

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Today they will announce a second fund, Founders Fund II. It’s much larger – $220 million. And unlike the first fund, the money comes mostly from outside investors. The new fund will allow Founders Fund to make 15-20 new investments, including pro-rata investments in follow on rounds.

A couple of investments have been made out of the new fund, they say, but have not yet been disclosed.

Founders Fund partners have deep connections in Silicon Valley, which help with deal flow (Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal, Ken Howery, founder and former CFO of PayPal, Luke Nosek, founder and former Vice President of PayPal and Sean Parker, founder and former CEO or President of Napster, Plaxo and Facebook). But they also approach deals differently than most other funds.

Sean Parker said today in a phone interview that a glut in venture capital, combined with reduced capital needs of most startups, has led to a shift in balance of power between entrepreneurs and VCs. Founders Fund recognizes that shift and has evolved does deals a little differently because of it. For example, they invented and promote the issuance of a special class of stock, called Series FF, which allows entrepreneurs to take money off the table much earlier in their company’s lifecycle. They also allow significantly more liberal voting rights to founder board members than many other funds. See this article in the SF Chronicle earlier this year for more on how they do business.

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Now founders Sean Parker and Joe Green are leveraging another phenomenon to increase participation even further: virtual gifts. Facebook has been selling them since February this year. A number of unofficial virtual gift applications created by third parties have also launched on Facebook. Clearly, they are here to stay. Facebook says 24 million of them have been given away through the official application alone (although many of them were free).

But now you can give a gift that says a little more than “I spent a dollar on you.” With Gifts from Causes, you can give a $10 – $200 gift to a friend. Each virtual gift (see image below) benefits a different charity. 100% of the proceeds (minus only credit card fees) go directly to the charity.

$10 gives two blankets to people in a disaster area. Or one insecticide-treaded bed net to a child in Africa to fight Malaria. Or a soccer ball to a poor child. etc. So the next time you want to send your boyfriend a rose, think about spending $15 instead and sending him a teddy bear. In the real world, a sick child will receive a real teddy bear, thanks to your generosity.

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The company was founded by Sean Parker and Joe Green and is designed to help social causes – charities, religions, political parties and candidates, etc.

Integration with Facebook is very, very deep, which isn’t surprising given the founders connections to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO. Parker was Facebook’s founding President, and Green was Zuckerberg’s college roomate.

Facebook already has a popular “groups” application, and many social causes are represented as a group. Groups, however, don’t let users do much more than join. With Agape, users can create causes, take donations, and recruit members. Whenever someone creates a cause or joins one, it shows up in their news feed for their friends to see. Information about the cause is also included in the profile itself, including total amount raised by that user and new users recruited.

There’s a multi level marketing approach, too. Any money donated by other users you’ve recruited is also included in your “money raised” total (see top image). Gaining status by recruiting members and getting donations will be a big incentive for users to not only join a cause that they feel strongly about, but will also get them to participate on an ongoing basis.

I spoke with Green and Parker and asked them why they decided to show their service to the public for the first time via Facebook instead of launching on their own site. The answer: Facebook has a huge and active user base (20 million users, each viewing 50 pages daily on Facebook), and they are a demographic that is highly likely to want to become involved actively in causes they believe in. The hugh popularity of Facebook Groups is evidence of this, they say.

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Parker is a larger-than-life twenty seven year old who co-founded Napster and Plaxo and was the founding president of Facebook. He’s been working full time on Project Agape for the last eight months, while still putting in the hours at Founders Fund as a Managing Partner.

Parker knows about how to apply viral principles to ideas. Half of our 1.5 hour meeting was spent discussing these principles and how to fine tune ideas to the point where they can grow exponentially. The only thing that can stop a good viral idea is when it runs out of population, he says. If Napster, Plaxo and Facebook are any example, he just might be right.

Project Agape is still under a heavy cloak of secrecy (Om Malik first got wind of the new venture a week and a half ago), although I was able to see a demo and some additional conceptual work. Parker’s goal, he says, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.

Charities, political parties and affinity groups all rely on participation from people who share the same beliefs and ideals. But recruiting and fundraising are largely stuck in the pre-Internet era: social pressure and guilt are applied to get others to donate to that marathon for the Leukemia society, or donate time working with the homeless. Parker wants to harness those proven incentive structures use his new startup to increase their effectiveness.

New sites like Change.org and dotherightthing and Six Degrees help people talk about issues online, but they don’t go far enough in using virality to get new users and get them actually doing things. Parker wants the kind of activity around these organizations that Facebook sees – tens of thousands of new daily users and hours and hours of social interactions. The result, he says, will be a much more efficient engine for organizations to get volunteers and raise money.

The company is based in Berkeley and will make some announcements in the coming weeks, and a beta product will be available in a couple of months. Stay tuned for more.

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