Google Launches Community Networking Site

Google has announced on their Official Google blog a new initiative All For Good saying

“it’s not simple to search across opportunities from a variety of places to find what’s right for you. We have some experience finding relevant information from among many scattered sources, and when we learned that President Obama and the First Lady were making community service a top priority even before taking office, we thought we could help make a difference…. a group of “20%” engineers, designers, and program managers from Google and other tech companies began work on All for Good, a new service to help you find volunteer events in your community, and share those events with your friends.

All for Good provides a single search interface for volunteer activities”

On the site itself there is a YouTube video with this message from Michelle Obama

Why I love these kind of initiatives is that it really puts the social into social media. The web can bring people together with shared interests, it can create a community, it can inspire action. So often we can see ‘pure marketing techniques for business profit….and of course there is nothing wrong with that….but this is using social media for profit purposes rather than pure social benefit.

I believe governments across the world could really learn from the Obama approach, they seem to really understand the art of connection rather than the art of brainwashing :)