As part of Green Thing's strategy of going to where people congregate to apply the twin powers of delightful content and peer pressure to encourage green behaviours, we have built
that provides most of the functionality of the site within the Facebook context.
It ranks your friends by actions they have taken and lets you watch the hilarious videos that support each month's action - this month is about turning off our
sucking machines. But one of my favourite little features is still the tamagotchi-style Green Thing creatures that get put on your shelf as you perform the actions, and the fact that if you don't keep going back and doing the actions, then the creatures start to cry and finally fade to sepia.
Here are mine as of this morning (room for improvement, I know):
Colin Schlüter, Alex Stubbs and the team did some great work on this over the past few months, supported by the Green Thing crew.
Green Thing are always working on ideas to improve the site, and to get the right balance between delightful content and social features. We had some great debates during the design and build of the initial site about this, and I am pleased we didn't fall into the echo chamber trap of just trying to appeal to geeks who use all these new fangled online services, but we were still able to push through an impressive amount of connected goodness with user-submitted videos, blog posts, audio files and photos, as well as connecting on twitter, youtube and now Facebook and small features like the activity feeds and RSS to keep people in touch with what others are doing. Most of all, I like the slightly quirky character of the site, which combines top-notch content production values with a deliberately not-over-designed site experience.
I can't wait to see what emerges in the next version. You can get an insight into Andy Hobsbawm's thinking in his
response to some feedback from Suw Charman on Seesmic. Some of the ideas mentioned here have been under consideration since the beginning, but as Andy says it is important to keep it super simple to support the widest possible level of user engagement.
If you are not already doing the Green thing, then
why not give it a go. If you are a friend of mine on Faceook, expect to be spammed relentlessly with invites until you cave in and sign up ;-)