IDEA #68 - Instructing Users to Collectively Participate (Facebook)
By Steve Poland • September 6, 2007
An app where we give people instructions to do things; we give them purpose to live each day. Maybe we change this “task” every 6 hours or something; or maybe it’s more frequently (or maybe there’s just always a big list of things we can task users to do). Some quick ideas of what we may tell a user to do:
What is the greatest thing in your city?
Photograph the 3 meals you eat today.
Take a photo in the tanning booth.
Who/where is your hair dresser?
Basically we create the largest community of new content and photos from people in all sorts of cities. Then we get others to comment on these photos, videos, or text write-ups.
We get to a point where we are instructing people and giving them purpose each day. “Everyone go on the subway or bus today, and photograph it. Submit here.”
We could do good things in the world as well — “Go out on your street and pickup 10 cigarette butts”.
Or we could do funny things, “Go out today in all black, to your local Starbucks, and at 1pm EST, starting singing ‘happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me’” or something like that. Those kind of funny things would eventually get press, and kids in Facebook would love participating.
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3 Responses to “IDEA #68 - Instructing Users to Collectively Participate (Facebook)”
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I like this idea… not as a business, but as a fun social experiment along the lines of Post Secret. You could probably manage it with a regular Facebook Group - no real need for an app necessarily.
This is so simple and so silly it would probably be brilliantly successful. One suggestion, maybe make the suggestions votable. Meaning allow users to submit suggestions, people vote on those which make it to the front page (or whatever) THEN have people go and do them.
I was at a music fest in Seattle over Labor Day and heard of this art project that was doing something very similar. People loved the concept, but gaining awareness is a big problem. Doing this through Facebook would be huge - great idea!
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