UPDATE (3/14/2009 1:07 AM EDT): Check out the blog post from Community Voice Mail addressing my concerns. Oddly, the blogger there claims to have left comments here but I don’t see anything. Just so you all know, I don’t moderate comments except if you put more than one external HTML link in your comment as that’s a sign you may be a spammer. On to the original article…

Launched today, Google Voice is the newest update to Grandcentral,
a service I’ve used since near its inception. It generates a universal phone number that ties together various services such as all your other phone numbers, voicemail, VOIP, SMS and even your Gmail contacts. It’s seamless, it’s convenient, and I love it. The tech press points out that Google Voice is a direct challenge to other established for-profit services such as eBay’s Skype, Vonage and Comcast. They missed out its effect on one nonprofit, Community Voicemail, that offers free voicemail for nonprofit clients.

In the past, I was responsible for handling the technical side of Community Voicemail for New York City. It’s admirable goal was to provide free voicemail accounts for homeless clients throughout the city. At its peak, we had thousands of voicemail accounts being routed out of the office of the Coalition for the Homeless. Over time, it slowly became a burden as the hardware slowly died and then it was down for weeks when replacement hardware was shipped and installed. And then Grandcentral arrived. You could GIVE your clients free voicemail. When it was bought out by Google, Grandcentral unfortunately stopped giving out new accounts. Community Voicemail got a reprieve.

During my time working with them from 2002-2007, there was never an attempt by Community Voicemail to change their client-server delivery method. There was no attempt to build an open API, widgetize it, integrate it with social networks, indeed there wasn’t even a Web client through which you could provision services. Delivery of software for a nationally unified CVM that wouldn’t require direct provisioning of local telephone numbers by a nonprofit was promised but never delivered. You had to have Cisco equipment on-premises just to even start.

There is no doubt that a lot of good was done by CVM before Grandcentral showed up on the scene. Many clients attested to its usefulness. However, Community Voicemail is made redundant in the face of publicly available free voicemail. Indeed, Grandcentral actually offered homeless people in San Francisco free voicemail just like CVM. In 2006, the writing was on the wall and I counseled the Coalition to shut down the New York CVM service and we did. I’m upset that Grandcentral shut down giving out accounts soon afterwards but the launch of Google Voice today ultimately confirms my intuition about voice telephony. Voice is low-bandwidth and the processing of it is hardly more complicated than say email or even IM. It’s so cheap from a data processing point of view that it will be offered for free. Google Voice is just another milestone to a free voice plan for all.

As I said in 2006:

In a deep way, this really gets to the heart of what any non-profit’s true mission is which I believe is to render itself obsolete. If the private sector in the guise of Grandcentral is providing free voicemail, then shouldn’t every non-profit that is currently providing free voicemail in a very serious way ask: “Should we shut down our free voicemail services?” While this may be a sad outcome for many people, we should consider it a victory ultimately for the ability of our sector to step in when no one else did and conversely, to back off when others pick up the slack.

I think Community Voicemail desperately needs a new raison d’etre and indeed there is room in their mission statement to evolve away from voicemail as their only mode of service:

Community Voice Mail (CVM) helps people living in poverty, transition and homelessness rebuild their lives by connecting them to jobs, housing, information and hope. We do this by customizing and distributing communications technology via a national network of community-based services.

They can’t just be a free voicemail provisioner. They need to attack other issues that social services clients face but would be in the same realm of voicemail. Voicemail was ultimately about keeping data in safekeeping for nonprofit clients. Many social services clients don’t just have voicemail as a problem, they also have data safekeeping issues. In other words, it’s really tough for clients to keep all their documentation straight when they’re homeless. I’ve often thought it would be a good idea for homeless clients to also have a one-stop shop where they can could scan in documents such as wedding, birth and naturalization certificates as well as any other government documents so that any nonprofit they’re working with could print them out. Think of it as a electronic folder that makes it easier for clients to keep track of the work they’re doing with nonprofits. With the advent of EC2 and S3, this could easily be a national service that Community Voicemail could start without a large outlay of money.

It’s clear that nonprofits that work with technology will always face the problem of being made obsolete in the face of larger and better-funded ventures. There’s nothing wrong with simply stepping back and reassessing your mission from time to time in the face of that. I really hope that Community Voicemail takes this post to heart and really look into modifying their programs.

Above is a screen shot from Forbes.com. Check out the #1 most searched for item on the site. I find the word “charities” interesting as it is used interchangeably with the word “nonprofit” here in the US. I decided to take a look at a Google Trends comparison between the two terms. Check it out:

I’ve marked up the interesting peaks for the word “charities”. The first two arrows point to the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina disasters. The other arrows point to the seasonal peaks in giving every year. Clearly, that’s what we’re seeing when Forbes shows “charities” as its #1 search term.

For extra credit, I ran this Google Trends search and limited it so that it only covered searches in the US. You’ll find that there is an even more stark comparison between the two terms during times of disaster.

The lesson is: Yes, you are a nonprofit but use the word charity if you’re the kind of nonprofit that is sought after during disasters.

The news business however prefers to use the term nonprofit over charities. There are many more news items with the word “nonprofit” in it than there are items with the word “charities”.

In the last four years, search volumes for both terms have steadily dropped while the number of news items about nonprofits and charities have risen. I think this is attributable to the general economic downturn we’ve been seeing but it may also be that people are looking to particular web sites and simply using old bookmarks when they seek out charities.

If that second thesis is true, nonprofits that don’t have significant web presences are going to see diminishing returns as users start to home in on their preferred web sites when their need to contribute to charities rises. It’s hard to tell without more data than just a Google Trends chart but it’s certainly something to see if it holds in the future. All we really need is an economic recovery (not likely right now, I know) so we can see if the decrease in search volume continues. I’d love to hear your comments.

I was just looking into Google’s Knol after reading a Techcrunch article about it. As you may know, Google’s Knol is Google’s version of Wikipedia but with Google Ads and money being driven to the writer of each article. If it sounds like the private sector is trying to replicate something a nonprofit is already doing, then you’re quite right. Regardless of the merits of Knol (I’m not sure it’s going to take off), I found something very interesting almost immediately.

I took a look at the article for software as a service and lo and behold, Timothy Chou, has written the article. If you’re not a Blackbaud nerd like I am, you wouldn’t know that the Timothy Chou who wrote the article was the Timothy Chou who is on Blackbaud’s Board of Directors. He writes:

You will have many choices. You can choose to sell Model 1 and Model 4, which is what Oracle did. You can choose to use Model 1 and Model 5, which is what Callidus Software did. You can choose to move completely to Model 6, which is what Concur did. You can choose to start out a new business in Model 6, which is what Salesforce.com did. You can choose to acquire Model 6 companies, and have some of your product line in Model 1 and some in Model 6, which is what Blackbaud did. [emphasis mine]

This may be another Timothy Chou but it’s highly unlikely that an article that talks about Software as a Service and basically namechecks Timothy Chou’s past business relations (he works for Oracle, shilled for Callidus and again, is on Blackbaud’s board) is not going to be written by him. Tim don’t hide — fill out that biography! An interesting note is that the article was originally published on 2/25/2008 which I guess means that the Kintera negotiations were probably already in the air during that time.

A Model 1 company is your traditional software business model. Model 6 is Software as a Service as we’ve seen it in salesforce.com. It’s a wide open clue if you know, not so much if you don’t that Timothy Chou seems to be referring to the purchase of Kintera here and the current state of Blackbaud’s software outside of that. I’m hoping for more Model 6 out of Blackbaud in the future.

Talk about trying to own a phrase that you don’t yet deserve! I suspect submission of other articles in the future from say, Tad Druart of Convio mentioning Aikido Convio Common Ground (yeah they changed the name so no more hillarious Google search mashups of nonprofits and pictures of guys doing Aikido (bow to your sensei!)) and how it’s a clear example of “computer technology” and “fundraising” at the same time.

What’s interesting here is that Knol is already being penetrated by corporate shills – indeed there is a wonderful article on Dr. Tom Lue by Tom Lue himself. Clearly, the age of Googling for yourself is being supplanted by getting an article on yourself ON Google. Watch out for my own entry on Knol entitled “Abe Namer: The Many Wonderful Disguises of Allan Benamer” under “Stuff”.

A Google search for “Burma” now turns up the following URLs that users are being directed to within Google Ads on the right-hand side of the page.

www.unicefusa.org
www.WorldVision.org
www.DirectRelief.org
www.FoundationBurma.org
www.charitynavigator.org
www.gfa.org/Burma-Cyclone
imcworldwide.org/cyclone_nargis
doctorswithoutborders.org

The potential for abuse of disaster relief-oriented keywords remains high. Clearly, opportunistic nonprofits could hijack the concern that donors rightly have for Burma and do a quick Google AdWords buy to redirect possible donations to their organization. One could make the case that nonprofits that had made buys on SEO keywords before the Cyclone Nargis hit should be given higher priorities than Johnny-come-latelies. Two of these new organizations, Direct Relief and UNICEF, also have Google Checkout accounts which I believe will lead to discussion as to the “purity” of Google’s presentation of contextual ads for this search. Is Google acting in a self-serving manner if two out of eight charities receiving top positioning for the “Burma” keyword also happen to be users of its Google Checkout service? Lucy Bernholz rightly raises that question in her post on this issue as well.

Although I don’t necessarily agree with the rest of her positions, like the creation of an online stockticker mechanism to track online fundraising (too many structural barriers to that currently), it’s important to note that one does not need to be a megacharity like UNICEF or World Vision to get good AdWords placement on Burma. It could also very well be the case that Google is just allowing the AdWords buys to ride for now without any cherrypicking on its end. You may notice the anomalous nonprofit in the list, foundationburma.org, which is run by the Foundation for the People of Burma. It’s a tiny 501c3 that had slightly under $900,000 in annual revenue in 2006. Clearly, they understood what this could mean in driving their fundraising. Kudos to them.

In this case, the keyword “Burma” doesn’t attract a lot of traffic so max suggested CPC for Burma is $1.25 with a monthly budget of $30. Be aware that these AdWords figures will rise along as more donors seeking to donate to this issue click on these ads. However, for now, for the cost of three tickets to the movies, your organization can be up there next to UNICEF and World Vision. As competition in the AdWords marketplace continues, it’s clear that future disasters are going to require bold action by relevant nonprofits to place their AdWords quickly and decisively. If your organization doesn’t know how to use Google AdWords and serves in a first- or second-responder capacity to crises either international or domestic, you should definitely ensure that Google AdWords knowledge is ingrained within your fundraising staff. This responsibility, I believe, is a good fit for the more business-oriented and math-savvy IT director.

UPDATE: Check out http://www.google.com/myanmarcyclone/. While I’ve touted Google Checkout for Nonprofits in the past (heck I even use it over at socialmarkets), I believe this is a pretty blatant signal that one should adopt Google Checkout if you want premium placement. That said, Google is matching up to $1 million in donations.

UPDATE (5/14/2008 11:42 PM): Google AdWords pricing for “Burma” has risen by 500% as competition continues for the keyword. Google AdWords is now reporting the following pricing for the keyword “Burma”:

Average CPC: $0.68 (at a maximum CPC of $1.25)
Estimated clicks per day: 143 – 182 (at a daily budget of $150.00)

And “Myanmar” isn’t any better:

Average CPC: $0.62 (at a maximum CPC of $1.69)
Estimated clicks per day: 284 – 356 (at a daily budget of $250.00)

Meanwhile, Google Trends is reporting very large increases in searches on both “Burma” and “Myanmar”.

Also, Lucy Bernholz on Philanthropy 2173 mentioned this article as well.

UPDATE: As of 4/21/2008, this post has been revised to include the domain verification process.

Step 1. Go to http://www.google.com/a

Look around for the “Organizations and members” link in the lower right-hand corner and click on that link to go to Step 2.

Step 2. Click on the Google Apps Education Edition link near the bottom of the screen to go to Step 3.

Step 3. You will be asked to enter a domain name.

In this case, I am using mydemononprofit.org. Enter the domain name you set up in Step 2 of Part I of this series. Don’t use mydemononprofit.org. It won’t work. Trust me. Click on “Get started” to go to Step 4.

Step 4. This is the major sign-up sheet for your organization.

You will need your Employer ID/Federal Tax ID number to fill this out properly. You can’t really fake this part for too long — Google is checking you against a database of Federal Tax IDs. Forget Santa Claus — Google knows who is naughty or nice.

Please substitute the information in the form with your org’s information. You can enter less people for number of users but I think 1 is your minimum. I’m assuming your organization does NOT provide e-mail accounts. That is, you’re probably using a Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, or Hotmail account for your org. This tutorial doesn’t cover moving your e-mail over from another e-mail system to Google Apps. I suggest that as a workaround you just forward all your old e-mail to your new account after your new e-mail is working. Make sure you are entered as a “Non-profit organization”.

Hit the “Continue” button (not shown) at the bottom of this page to go to Step 5.

Step 5. This page has you enter your username and password.

Please make sure you remember the username and password you enter in this screen. Write it down if you have to but throw it away once you’ve got it memorized. Really. I mean it. Click on “I accept. Continue with set up” to go to step 6.

Step 6. You made it! You’ve got Google Apps set up for your organization.

Now it’s time to configure your e-mail. If you followed Part II of this series, your e-mail should already be ready to flow to your new Google Apps set up. Go to Step 7.

Step 7. Look at the right-hand side of your screen.

Click on the “Activate email” link to go to Step 8.

Step 8. Does this look familiar?

You already did these steps in Part II. If you have not, please make sure you do these steps in GoDaddy. Otherwise, e-mail will not come to your domain. Think of it as creating the digital equivalent of a sign telling the postman that you are now here at Google Apps. The postman will now drop off the e-mail at your new address.

If you have already made the necessary DNS changes from Part II, feel free to click on “I have completed these steps” to go to Step 9.

Step 9. You did it!

Google is now checking your MX records. At this point, you’ll have to cool your heels for at least a day or two while Google is making sure your new domain is correct. Also, they’ll be checking to see if you are a real nonprofit in the meantime.

Step 10. But wait there’s more. Do you see this message at the top?

Google has to make sure you really own this domain. In order to prove to Google you do, you have click on “Verify domain ownership” to go to Step 11.

Step 11. Google now asks you for which verification method to choose.

Click on the little down arrow to choose a method and to go to Step 12.

Step 12. Click on “Change your CNAME record”.

Ok, you’ll need to copy and paste that “unique string” somewhere. You will need it because we’re heading back into GoDaddy to get you back into the Total DNS control screen.

Step 13. Assuming that you’ve already signed up with GoDaddy in Part I of this series, please click on “My Account” after you’ve logged in.

Step 14. Look at the left-hand side of the screen and look for “Manage Domains”. Click on “Manage Domains”.

Step 15. Look for your nonprofit’s domain name. In this example, I called it mynonprofits.org. Click on the link to your domain name.

Step 16. Click on “Total DNS Control and MX Records”. It’s on the right-hand side of your screen.

Step 17. Look for the CNAMES section on the left-hand side of your screen.

Click on the “+” next to CNAMES to go to Step 18.

Step 18. The CNAMES section popped up. Look at the right-hand side of the screen for “Add New CNAME Record”.

Click on “Add New CNAME Record” to go to Step 19.

Step 19. This is where you enter the unique identifier Google Apps gave you in Step 12.

Please fill out the form in the same as the screen shot above. Just make sure to enter YOUR unique string from Step 12. Click on OK to go to Step 20.

Step 20. GoDaddy should give you a confirmation screen.

Step 21. Go back to http://www.google.com/a

Look at the top right-hand corner of the screen. You’re now a returning user.

Click on “Returning user, sign in here” to go to Step 11.

Step 22. Look at the top right-hand corner of the screen.

Kind of weird, right? You click on the link above and nothing happened except that now the screen is asking for something new.

Make it look like the screen shot below:

Enter your domain and click on the arrow that’s pointing down until it says “Manage this domain”. Click “Go” to go to Step 12.

Step 23. What’s this? Google says “Your domain has changed to a new edition of Google Apps.”

What does that mean? It means you’re legit! Google has figured out you’re really a nice person with a heart of gold and thus are capable of running a nonprofit. It figured this out by dividing the number of Google searches you made on “kittehs” by the number of times you have said “LOL” while in GChat. Just kidding. Basically, they just did a search on the Federal Tax ID you submitted and moved you over to Google Apps for Non-Profits. Please note that this screen may not necessarily show until Google has figured you out.

You can pick any administrator username you want. However, it’s probably smarter to use “administrator” instead of your actual username. That way, if you add more users later on, they won’t need to have access to your e-mail account to change Google Apps. Click on “I accept.” to go to Step 13.

Step 24. You’re back in the administration screen!

Notice how the “We are checking MX records for your domain” notice is gone. Instead, you have a URL that says “http://mail.google.com/a/mydemononprofit.org” underneath the E-mail section. If you click on it, you will get your new e-mail.

Step 25. You may also see this message at the top of your screen:

You don’t need to re-verify domain ownership. Just make sure this message isn’t around for a couple of days.

That ends part III of the series. You now have e-mail and Google Apps running for your domain. Your domain will also be verified by Google Apps. You’ve started to get your non-profit up and running. There is one thing that I’ve left undone and that is, you don’t have custom subdomains for your Google Apps. Basically, instead of going to http://mail.google.com/a/mydemononprofit.org for your e-mail, you can set up a custom subdomain like “mail.mydemononprofit.org” instead. It’s much shorter than the way Google Apps leaves it to you. If enough people are interested, I can write a tutorial for that as well.

I also have another offer. Do you want to see what a live demo of Google Apps using the mydemononprofit.org domain looks like? E-mail me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org and I can set you up with an account and you can play around with Google Apps yourself.

Despite the lengthy instructions you’ve followed, you don’t have a Web site yet and I’m going to introduce a new series, “How to create a free Website for your nonprofit.” However, don’t worry too much about a Web site yet. You have a lot to learn about how to use Google Apps. Don’t forget. It’s more than just a place to get e-mail. You can write documents, make spreadsheets and collaborate with others. To learn more, go to http://google.com/support/a/. Please leave me any comments as to how you’ve used this series to get your non-profit up on the Web. Any feedback you might have would be appreciated.

Update: It looks like I forgot to do the domain verification procedure that Google asks for. Don’t worry — Google gives you a grace period of 30 days after your Google Apps site has been created. I’m working with Google right now to write the necessary instructions for domain verification.

Hat tip to Techcrunch for pointing out that Google has just launched a non-profit specific portal. It’s a pretty simple way to finally repackage all the Google nonprofit services in one page. This is great for the average nonprofit executive looking to take advantage of Google’s special programs for non-profits. Those of you who are overseas will be happy to note that Google is looking to serve more nonprofits outside of the US if they have registered with key authorities in their home country. However, the coverage still varies so each specific program will have its own rule. For instance, Google Checkout still looks to serve only US nonprofits while Google Grants serves nonprofits in many countries.

Step 1. Assuming that you’ve already signed up with GoDaddy in Part I of this series, please click on “My Account” after you’ve logged in.

Step 2. Look at the left-hand side of the screen and look for “Manage Domains”. Click on “Manage Domains”.

Step 3. Look for your nonprofit’s domain name. In this example, I called it mynonprofits.org. Click on the link to your domain name.

Step 4. Click on “Total DNS Control and MX Records”. It’s on the right-hand side of your screen.

Step 5. This is what the DNS records for your domain will look like. They’re nice but not useful for getting your site to work with Google Apps. Go to Step 6.

Step 6. Do you see the records called MX (Mail Exchange) from Step 5? To the right, there are these boxes with a little “x” in them. You need to delete these MX records to prepare your domain name to accept Google Apps. Now click on both of those little boxes.

Step 7. Now that’s done, you need to add a bunch of MX records per Google’s instructions. Click on the “Add New MX Record” box. This will allow you to enter the records for Google Apps. This will make e-mail for your nonprofit’s domain go through Google instead of the default e-mail servers that GoDaddy had set up for you. You will have to keep adding new MX records until you go through the list of Google servers.

Step 8. This is the screen for entering all of Google Apps’ information. This is a quote from Google’s FAQ on setting up MX records using GoDaddy.

For each MX Record, enter information according to the data in the table below:

• For the Select the Priority Value drop-down menu, enter the priority value.
• For Enter a Host Name, leave the default setting to @.
• For Enter Goes To Address enter the Gmail server name.
• For the Select TTL Value drop-down menu, enter 1 Week. This will appear as 604800 seconds within the DNS system.
  

  PriorityValue	HostName	Goes To Address (Mail Server)	TTLValue
  10	@	ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	1 Week
  20	@	ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	1 Week
  30	@	ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	1 Week
  40	@	ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	1 Week
  50	@	ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	1 Week

Ok, did you enter all of the MX records? Make sure you go through all five of them and keep entering those records. That’s it for now. Your domain is now configured to pass e-mail through Google apps.

“…for example, Rasmussen could send a message about a patient with untreated symptoms in Laos (near Vietnam) via SMS on his phone, which might only have one signal bar of service. That message could then be broadcast to anyone subscribed to his messages, including aid workers at UNICEF or InSTEDD’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., which could show his location and note on a Google Earth map.”

The project, called InSTEDD, has received $5 million from Google.org and $1 million from the Rockefeller Foundation. From an engineering perspective, this would be easy to do. There’s probably a Google Android tie-in here where you’d use a Google phone as the handset of choice for entering these SMS messages. Does that mean that Google would turn off Google AdWords for phones in a disaster area? I’d assume they would.

It’s a nice start to a pretty significant problem but I’m not sure if nonprofits have adequate supply chain management and enterprise resource planning solutions to respond to random individual SMS messages in a particular geographic location. You’d end up having to spread the response over multiple nonprofits, many of whom have yet to establish a record of data sharing, much less resource sharing. It would require a pretty large realignment on the part of even the largest nonprofits to have that kind of emergency services available.

That said, I really do hope that they build what we programers call a loosely-coupled solution where there’s just enough services to bring data communications to the very doorstep of a nonprofit that’s expected to respond to these communications but not so much as to overburden them with having to set up an entirely new infrastructure (because they won’t do that anyway). What I don’t get though is how funding for nonprofits would be available to respond to emergency messages like this. At the very least, you’d need to hire someone to receive these messages and respond to them. I’ve seen a lot of technical projects fail not because of the technology but because the business case wasn’t made adequately and I don’t think it’s been made yet for this project. As always, it’s good to have an open mind when approaching this problem.

Get your FAQs here and everything else here. Most important point for those of you looking to build an OpenSocial app? Google will host your app for you. The FAQ says:

Google will do all the hosting for you if you want, but you are also free to use your own servers.

That’s right, a major barrier to entry has been removed. No guarantees as to how Google will solve this issue but it looks like they’re extrapolating server load from the current loads on the servers they use to host Google Gadgets and I guess they figure that they can handle it. And no, there is NO SLA for Google OpenSocial. However, it comes down to a matter of trust of who you want to host your app. Which would you rather choose? Convio or Google? It’s still unknown what this means but I guess Google will do anything to make the developer experience painless if only to stop developers from making more Facebook apps.

And oh yeah, as of yesterday, some tiny social network called MySpace is part of Google OpenSocial now too. That’s a potential audience of 200 million or so users. Facebook has been outflanked. I’m stunned by how swiftly the momentum has moved to Google. This not only changes the game for social network users but widget manufacturers as well. Google Gadgets are going to become the de facto widget of the Web.

More good news for nonprofits too… Theikos is participating in the Google OpenSocial rollout. They’ve been mentioned before as a nonprofit resource. You can now get your salesforce.com and social app groove on with the same vendor. Nice. Next thing? How do we integrate Google Checkout with social apps? That can theoretically hit the trifecta… Google Checkout for Nonprofits, with the results saved in salesforce.com, in every social network but Facebook. It would be free and widely available — a definite double-plus good for nonprofits.

So here we go again! Another major step in the development of a new social networking platform is set to release tomorrow. Google and a panoply of other social networks have decided to one-up Facebook and create a super-platform whereby developers can create one application that can be served over Orkut (Google’s social network), LinkedIn, Hi5, Ning, Plaxo, and Friendster. Oddly enough, salesforce.com is in this mix too but it’s hard to understand how they can be a part of this unless your app can be added through AppExchange.

However it may be, your average nonprofit will not be able to take advantage of this development in a meaningful way. There’s no doubt that a few will be able to do so but that’s because they’ve already adopted the infrastructure and skill sets that would allow for rapid adoption for new technology. As I outlined in a couple of earlier posts, if you’re not even state-of-2005 in your application development practices, don’t bother with OpenSocial. Basically, your IT architecture needs to handle hundreds and then eventually thousands of requests per minute and you need to do some seriously rapid application development. If you’re not using EC2 or a web framework like Django or Ruby on Rails or even an agile methodology, forget about it. You’re toast. However, I suspect only ventures that are VC-backed will be quick enough to do this.

It’s an interesting race because one could say that Project Agape’s Causes has had an unfair competitive advantage due to Joe Green’s connections to Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. As a result, Causes was the ONLY charity app on Facebook for several weeks and had a huge head start during a period when you could invite an unlimited number of your friends to the app. To this date, competing charity apps are having a tough time breaking 20,000 users while Causes is probably going to have its seven millionth user before mid-November. If Causes is the 800 lb. gorilla of Facebook charity apps, it has little or no recognition outside of it. It’s about as pure a play on Facebook as you can get it as Project Agape doesn’t even have an extensive Web presence.

Google OpenSocial hits a reset button for all the players involved – we can now see whether or not the new microphilanthropies (including the one I’m a part of — socialmarkets.org) will be able to change course and adopt this new API. Ironically, this makes the Facebook portion of Convio’s new open platform even more inadequate than it already is for dealing with this new open world of social networking. Facebook apps are not compatible with Google OpenSocial because Facebook’s markup language is only useful for Facebook. This is ultimately Google’s flanking maneuver against Facebook and probably something that may not have been released had Google won the bid to own a portion of Facebook. The incompatibility of the two APIs will certainly cause developers to look at the prospective user audiences involved. After all, at least for nonprofit technologists, LinkedIn has always represented a more “premium” audience for charity asks than Facebook ever did. The addition of the other social networks is nice and can round out your worldwide reach. For instance, Orkut is strong in India and Friendster in East and SE Asia. So imagine being a charity app developer, you can get fifty million young Anglophones (Facebook) or 100 million users worldwide (Google OpenSocial), which would you pick?

And yes, this means the Gold Rush begins TOMORROW. The chances for your app to explode in a viral fashion diminish quickly by every day you’re not out there. Sigh. It’s like the 1990s all over again.