FreeCause Makes Social Networking History

Posted by Jonathan Howard on January 26, 2009 under Company News, Facebook, SnapCMS |

Ask someone in their teens or twenties: when was the last time they wrote down a friend’s email address? Odds are most of them won’t be able to tell you. Between Facebook wall posts, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter updates, and more, people are increasingly turning to social media to communicate and stay in touch online.

However, not all of a person’s friends are active on the same social networks. Often fans of one network may actively dislike using others, which leads to an interesting phenomenon - one you might be familiar with yourself. We’ll call it the social network boundary.

For instance, if most - but not all - of a user’s friends belong to Facebook, odds are they’ll tend to keep in better touch with their Facebook friends, and tend to lose touch with friends on other networks they use less frequently. Some users have even reported losing touch completely with friends who do not share a social network with them. We live in a post-address-book age, and it’s simply more difficult to keep in touch without the aid of these networks - especially at long distances. But now, with SnapCMS’s Stories object, social media communication has reached a new level.

For the first time, users are communicating in a meaningful way across social network boundaries.

The Stories object was initially developed for our Pink Ribbon application on Facebook, which benefits Susan G Komen for the Cure. It allows both Facebook and MySpace users to communicate with each other without leaving their preferred social network. The object allows users of the Pink Ribbon application to post stories about how breast cancer has touched their lives or their loved ones. Then, users from both networks can vote on the most moving stories, the most popular of which is periodically featured on the home page for all 5+ million users to see.

It also integrates with our Forum object, by creating cross-network forum threads on the fly, which correspond to each person’s story as it’s submitted. Since its initial launch in October 2008, this has enabled hundreds of breast cancer survivors and their families to connect, share, and learn from each other, regardless of which social network they use. And all of this is content is managed simply, in the same place: FreeCause SnapCMS.

At FreeCause, we really enjoy seeing our objects and applications have an impact on people’s lives in meaningful ways, and we’re always interested in new ways we can expand these possibilities. Do you have a great idea how to fit the Stories or Forum objects into your social networking strategy? As a social media user, what other things do you wish you could do across social network boundaries?

We’d love to hear from you.

Jonathan Howard
Senior Application Architect
Jonathan.Howard@FreeCause.com