Brainstorm!

[maradydd]

Prompted by a discussion with bunnykitteh, who's good at prompting these kinds of things:

Imagine a Facebook and/or MySpace application aimed at organising flash mobs for political action (e.g., the kind of thing Anonymous might use to quickly notify members of imminent $cientology activity in a particular location). What features should it have? (Twitter gateway?)

(Note that with Facebook, especially, there are all kinds of interesting concerns with respect to privacy...)

Comments

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I don't have any experience with Facebook/MySpace (programming or even really spending time on their sites), but...

How do you want to contact people? Email, SMS, IM, phone, nearby hackable electronic billboard *grin*...the more options you provide the better your coverage. (Some of us use SMS only as a last resort.)

Geo-based filtering might be useful so that a call to arms for a protest in Podunk doesn't annoy the activists in Artemisia.

Give people an easy way to invite others along who haven't signed up for your alerts.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

The first two are pretty easy to solve in software -- any of those contact methods (well, maybe not so much the billboard) are simple enough to implement, and geo-based filtering is solved too. The latter brings us to the "who do you trust" problem.