Last week, I gained some fascinating insight into the power of Facebook for local organizing in response to a need. As some of you may know, my wife was injured last Wednesday when she was hit by a car while out walking. She’s doing much better now and our 17-month-old daughter seems so far completely unharmed. We’re extremely thankful.

What was fascinating to me, though, was the role that Facebook played in the response to the accident.

When my wife called me to let me know what had happened, I was 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles getting ready to go out for a run before a long day at the ITEXPO conference/trade show speaking on a panel, meeting with analysts and recording some video interviews. There was obviously not much I could do from 3,000 miles away beyond try to reach a couple of people on the phone to see if they could help.

But what I did do was post a status update on Facebook.

What happened next was what we in the security community would refer to as a “denial-of-service attack” on our phone line… our home phone started ringing and pretty much didn’t stop the entire day. (And the “DoS” aspect is that we do not have call-waiting, so new callers got a busy signal for most of the day.) Our truly wonderful friends and family in the greater Keene, NH, area reached out to my wife with so many offers of help and support… it was incredibly humbling and VERY much appreciated. Email messages and Facebook messages poured in… to the point that there was simply no way my wife could even begin to answer them all. The word spread from Facebook out through email and phone to other channels, as well, letting people know at our daughter’s school, for instance.

As someone remote it was extremely reassuring to me to see the comments on my status updates, to see the posts on my wife’s Facebook wall/updates and to see the messages coming in. As I rearranged my schedule and spent most of the day on planes flying home, those messages certainly gave me a sense of reassurance that even though I personally could not be there to help, others were there to help.

It was a powerful personal reminder of the power of a connected community – and an interesting view into using a global tool like Facebook for local action in your community.

And yes, we’ve had tools for building online communities for 30+ years now…. BBSs, email lists, online services (think CompuServe), web forums… and a hundred other forms. Facebook is only the latest major player in the well-worn space… and 5 years from now maybe we’ll still be on Facebook or maybe we’ll have migrated to something else.

There is power there, though… the power of bringing people together – and so easily distributing news and information. Much more to write on this, methinks…

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Dear Facebook,

Can you please help us out here?  You see, we’ve come to understand that so much of the conversation these days is happening within the pretty walls of your garden. We like it.  We write there. We play there. We post photos. All is happy.

Some of us have even created Facebook “Pages” for various parts of our lives.  We’ve created Pages for our businesses or employers, schools, churches, community groups, bands, bars, blogs, causes, projects and pretty much anything else we want to promote.  I’ve done it myself for a book I wrote and also maintain my employer’s Page (Voxeo).

Here’s the problem.  There are certain <expletives deleted> unethical people who believe that they have a right to fill up your Facebook Page with links to whatever products or services they are paid to shill.  So they find your Facebook Page and leave posts on your Wall or add them as Links.

They are slimy spammers – and their garbage pollutes our Page and detracts from the conversations we want to have.

Sure, we as “Page administrators” can remove the postings to our Page, BUT WE HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT THEM FIRST!

This is the crux of the problem.  After all this time, you still don’t provide any way for us to know when someone has posted something to our Page.  Sure, you give us a weekly email summary of the activity on our pages… but that doesn’t really help us know what has been posted.

We have to keep going to back to each Page and checking now and then to make sure spammers aren’t polluting our page!

But what I don’t get, dear Facebook, is why this is so hard to do… I mean, you send email notifications for practically everything else that goes on within your pretty walls!  Most of my personal email inbox these days seems to be filled up with various notifications of who commented on what and who wrote on my wall and who sent me this and who did what to whom…

In fact, I can even get all those notifications by text message and receive them “in the moment” on my mobile phone.

So you are already notifying-us-to-death, Facebook… but why can’t you give us the one notification that we as content creators within your walls really need?   I mean, part of the point of Pages seems to be so that we’ll buy ads to promote our pages and get more “Likers” (side note: what the heck was wrong with “Fans”? It was so much easier to say).

So if we’re creating pages to then create ads to then give you MONEY, wouldn’t it make sense to help us out a bit?

Just send us yet another notification or text message whenever someone posts something new to our Pages.  Can it really be that hard for you to do?

Thanks for listening (or not),

Dan

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