There are big changes going on at facebook that will reshape the ways nonprofits will be able to use and leverage the platform. The biggest of these changes is the launch of some “gift” tools for your social network. These changes seem little at first “who cares if you can buy a song for a friend” but anyone that watched ITunes, Skype, Amazon and online donations scale up realizes that getting people to cough up credit card for credits is the biggest hurdle in ultimately freeing people from money. The more that facebook users get used to buying little bits of things online, using their credits, and making transactions online the easier it will be to help them convert facebook relationships into channels for sending money to your charity and campaign. I expect online donations to charities and groups with “pages” will grow proportionally with the amount of total exchanges on facebook. So seeing them add features like the new “buy a song” for a friend will be a big boost to those of us that look to facebook as a space for organizing relationships with people that use if like the way traditional users focused on their inbox. While...

This resonates with Clay Shirky, Beth Kanter and a bunch of riffs here on network-centric advocacy. Connecting people is taking over as the major service of the web. Newspapers provided information. Advocacy groups exist to connect people to each other. Connecting people with more than just text is the big leap. Connect people with voice, video and images. Connecting people to work, laugh, collaborate and create change is the golden opportunity of the next 10 years. Parker believes we’re shifting from the first phase of the Internet, which was dominated by what he calls “information services” These are companies like Google and Yahoo. But next up to dominate the web will be the “network services” like Facebook and Twitter, he believes. To be clear, he thinks Google will stay huge and relevant, but it’s dominance will go down because collecting data is less valuable than connecting people, he said. He went on to talk a bit about the social networking space, which is significant because he helped found Facebook. Sean Parker: Twitter/Facebook Will Soon Dominate The Web — Not Google.

Benkler is amazing. He says things that most of us spend time trying to argue. Complexity and Reach make planning impossible. (BOOM) It always has been but now it is more clear and more important to accept (BOOM). (min 20+...he is on fire) This is a really rich talk with important nods to the role of motivated people, fairness and group identity in these network models. I see his work as much less related to workplace economics and more related to advocacy and social planning. I still see the reflection of the seven elements of network functionality in his work. I really like the idea that common language and negotiating "fairness" in the network are linked. "Life is to complex to settle on the simple model". He is going after the economic tracking and design model for assessing output capacity and deviation without a centralized planner. Congratulations! The rest of us should be working on this in climate change work, agriculture policy, health reform, and the rest of the progressive agenda.

The thinking about network maps and traffic data as a management tool is catching on even in finance. They really are one of the few ways to understand complex systems. This is where Brunnermeier had his insight: What if I knew the relationship between one bank's value-at-risk and the value-at-risk of the entire industry? Then I could see how one institution's problem spills over to other institutions, and I could focus on the institutions that seem to be at the source of these problems. The data, collected not only from banks but also from hedge funds and insurance companies, would have immediate implications for the firms' activities. If the data pointed toward a risk pocket during a crisis, the firms would have to stop taking on new risks and stockpile more cash. If groups of firms started to show similar vulnerabilities, computers and human supervisors would see these patterns, ideally before they got out of hand. The Network | The New Republic

No more experts and intuition. Look at the data trends. Storage to $0 and processing power out the wazoo available for everyone. What massive datasets do you have? What data sets can you create with a little investment. Here are some applets that give you a sense of the kinds of things that Super Crunching can help predict. Use them at your own risk (The lawyer in me feels compelled to emphasize that I make no representation as to their accuracy). .

I have been hunting around for data like “google flu” those shadows cast by real people doing things that provide insight on big trends. I was looking at Facebook Lexicon to see what trend data could show.

I would imagine many people post something about “new job” or their friends congratulate them on “new jobs” via facebook. So I punched it into Lexicon.