It’s a well-argued and good read, particularly for anyone active and interested in social media:

Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

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Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

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[Social media tools] makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Read more of Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted” here.

Update: An excellent response by Maria Popova “Malcolm Gladwell Is #Wrong” is worth a read.

Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference.

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Limbo – Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.

On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt.

I think of both as the 2008 versions of Dodgeball, a mobile social networking service developed by two guys at ITP years ago, that was acquired by Google in 2005, and left to dwindle until the founders quit Google in 2007:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

Back in 2005, Clay Shirky broke down why Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball made sense:

* Dodgeball uses the mobile phone as its native platform, someplace Google wants to further extend it’s reach.

* Dodgeball does a better job mapping to real-world social networks than Orkut, since there’s an actual reason *not* to friend someone in db, namely that you don’t want to get spammed with 100 SMSes a night.

* Google’s mapping work is good at “Where am I?” and “Where is the gas
station?” but not so good at the question “Where are my friends?” Dodgeball is really good at that.

Given that the core Dodgeball proposition — we can mix fixed information about places and fluid information about people to create new value — improves a) the more information you have upfront and b) the more people are using it, the addition of db to Google is really good news for db, and will provide a really interesting platform for G to experiment with.

Three years later, with the explosion of location aware social applications, Google sure looks like it slept on a great idea.

Practically what that means is: less lawyers, don’t fake it, follow through, and address customers directly. Jaffe argues for shifting money from the media budget to staff customer service representatives and to be agile as new opportunities to extend a brand appear independently from campaigns. Good stuff.

If Advertising Age let me embed their Brightcove player I would have posted the video. Here’s a link.