Brainmesh is HiDef's weekly get together in which our team discusses technological innovations and trends and relate them to how they impact great causes such as nonprofits and social enterprises.

More Google I/O Announcements

Brad brought up quite a few important announcement that we didn't mention in our last Brainmesh. One is a pure javascript+CSS method of loading fonts in the browser, which is nice since most current methods rely on Flash. A few others worth mentioning are Google Storage, the Predict API, and a new Google Latitude API. This latter announcement goes to show that the geolocation field really is heating up, as we talked about last week. Finally, a couple other announcements of open-source contenders in a crowded field are Fusion Tables and MyTracks.

The Implications of Social Networks for Nonprofits

William talked about a paper entitled "Friends and neighbors on the Web" written in 2003 by Lada Adamic. The paper discusses the implications of a group knowing more about its user base by analyzing publicly-available information from "home pages." As he was talking it sounded a lot like what the Open Graph protocol is making very easy now, but most groups have yet to utilize fully. For instance, if a nonprofit were able to find a pattern of people loving music among their constituency, perhaps an event that linked that love for music with the nonprofit's cause would help tap those two passions.

Using Geolocation to Raise Awareness

Brian, who's become very interested in geolocation brought up Loopt Star, a new approach in the geolocation-based gaming and incentive space alongside Foursquare and Gowalla. The service works using Facebook or Twitter geolocation API services and is built around the desire to give people incentives. A second post he shared with us is a study of how Earth Justice used the "check-in" phenomenon to conduct a sponsored donation drive and raise awareness.

Collecting Donations via Text Messaging

Kemper popped in at the end of the 'mesh to tell us about mgive, a service that makes it super easy to collect donations via SMS. With these services a nonprofit should be very careful to study the fee structure, and mgive's looks pretty fair. To me it seems like "the Paypal of SMS giving."