Facebook generation: 10 tech revolutionaries

updated 6:00 a.m. ET Jan. 16, 2008

Time was, the Internet just distributed information. Then it evolved into a sort of electronic connector, linking everyone in a person’s social circle. Now? Fasten your seatbelts. Think social networks, dozens or hundreds of them — yours, your best friend’s, your coworker’s, your company’s — all connected together digitally by six degrees, then organized around a single cause or idea, or a multitude of causes and ideas. Save The Whales. Pave My Street. Elect John Doe. End Global Warming. But don’t stop there. Raise some money. Ask each one of these dozens, hundreds, thousands whom you’ve cause-wired to pitch in a dollar, an idea, a Saturday afternoon — from Delhi to Detroit. And then keep everyone posted by the hour or by the day on how much money they’re raising, how their ideas are being harnessed (or not), or how their time translates into someone else’s health or opportunity, or into everyone’s clean air. Show them perpetually — with the simple click of a mouse.

Sound far-fetched, like some warmed-over 60s’ social change rhetoric? Guess again. This stuff is already happening, and maybe faster than you think: As of June, some 41 percent of all Facebook visitors were over the age of 35. Suddenly, it seems, the world of philanthropy doesn’t look or feel the same anymore. Maybe your favorite charity now seems a bit out of touch — or, if it’s just as connected, it’s now the coolest thing on the planet. Call it the Cause Web. It’s turning the philanthropy world on its ear. Are you ready for the revolution?

Contribute's Tech 10 is not a hot list. It’s a selection not of the most powerful or the most glamorous or the most famous. There aren’t presidents of established foundations, nor celebrities. They’re not even the most vocal. Rather, they are a handful of some of the most influential new leaders at the very front lines of advocacy today, all using the power of the Cause Web to reshape the reach, impact, and experience of what it means to make a difference. They are innovators like Suzanne Seggerman, who founded Games for Change, to use video games to raise funds and awareness for those caught in the crossfire of global strife. Or Ailin Graef, a Chinese-born entrepreneur who is the first philanthropist in the maturing new world of Second Life. Or Charles Best, whose simple online auction model matches specific individuals on both sides of the give-get divide — a Manhattan banker, say, with an impoverished public school teacher in South Central Los Angeles — and completely removes the middleman to more quickly help those in need. But the real magic of our Tech 10 is the array of new technologies they represent. Herewith, our Tech 10:

Q&A with Facebook founders Sean Parker and Joe Green
Facebook, the popular social networking site spawned on college campuses several years ago, is growing up — and getting a social conscience. Some 11.5 million individual visitors to the Facebook site are now 35 or older, more than twice the number from the previous year: according to market researcher ComScore Media Metrix, the 35-and-up crowd now accounts for more than 41 percent of all Facebook visitors.

So how does Facebook grow without alienating its college core? Think altruism, says Joe Green and Sean Parker, the forces behind Facebook’s new Causes application — a bit of code you can easily add to your online profile to create a cause (or tout an existing one), raise money for it, and get others to sign on.

Sean Parker, left, and Joe Green

Launched early this past summer by Project Agape, a for-profit start-up funded by venture capitalists in California and cofounded by Parker and Green, Causes has attracted more than three million members so far; these millions, in turn, are combining to support tens of thousands of nonprofits and political causes. “This is a natural evolution of social networking,” says Parker, 27, also a cofounder of Napster, Plaxo, and Facebook. Adds Green, 24, a grassroots organizer: “Nonprofits tend to focus their fundraising efforts just on the wealthy. But cause networking unleashes the power of a multitude of younger, mainstream donors and gives what they care about a way to be heard.”

Contribute's Marcia Stepanek and Tracie McMillan caught up with the pair in August. What follows is an edited version of that interview:

How did this start?

SEAN: I cofounded Napster. I was 19 with my friend Sean Fanning; I was running around Washington, D.C., raising money from investors, and he was based up in Boston. It was the catalyst for a lot of the thinking I was doing around how you could use viral marketing to propagate messages and empower activists and try to do something interesting. I went on to cofound Facebook. There’s a perception that Facebook is for college kids but there’s nothing about Facebook which isn’t incredibly useful to an older population, and older people are starting to use it. Most of the growth is happening in the 25 to 34 demographic. We’ve reached 35 or so million users, 50 percent of whom come back to the site every day. There’s no site with a registered user base besides Facebook that has that level of activity of engagement. As people share things through the network, their friends find out about it, it sparks little conversations, and then they pass along the things which they find of interest. So Facebook is this sort of decentralized system for filtering information which is useful to everyone. There’s nothing age-limited about it whatsoever.

So why Causes?

SEAN: I think it’s a pretty natural evolution. The perception that social networking has been frivolous, I think, has existed amongst non-core Facebook users for a while, and certainly most of the applications up until now have been pretty frivolous. They’ve been about socializing, not socializing for a cause.

JOE: When you look at Facebook and social networking in general, it sort of heralds a fundamental change in how community works online. Before social networking, before Friendster, community online was very niche and very disconnected. You had Star Wars fans, and they got online and found other Star Wars fans, and their identity was sort of a handle. They were Hans Solo, or whomever. But it wasn’t them and there was no real connection to their real life. Then Facebook came along, and it’s about real people and real lives. A person’s profile contains his or her real photo and a real name. To convince your friends that I’m you would be pretty much impossible. Facebook creates this very trusted identity. And so what you’ve got now with Facebook is what (cofounder) Mark Zuckerberg likes to call the social graph — people connected to other people’s friends. It’s a map of social connections. What that allows you to do is to take things that are real-world and put them on this space and have them work far, far more efficiently.

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