Act.ly and Social Networks

I love act.ly! I am learning about it through my digital political strategy class at JHU. I just participated in a petition/experiment that my professor Dr. Alan Rosenblatt is conducting. Apparently there is a game for Twitterers called Mobster World (I'm not even going to link to it so that this doesn't happen to you too... you can search for it if you want!). If you sign up to play this game, it will hijack your follower list on Twitter and send them a direct message FROM YOU if you sign up to play! There's no way to make this stop - no contact information on Mobster's site and no way for people to click and opt-out.

Not only is this super-annoying but it's just WRONG! This got me remembering how annoying cold calling and automated calling is, especially when the "robot" fails and calls you at 2AM. At least now, I can do something about it from my own desk. I signed up for act.ly and "signed" Dr. Rosenblatt's petition by allowing act.ly to Tweet the cause on my Twitter account. My irritation actually led me to find and follow EndTheRoboCalls on Twitter and all sorts of interesting and cool petitions that I can participate in on Act.ly.

This takes advantage of the essence of social networking: republishing information to individual social networks makes that information viral and reaches many people quickly.

Maybe I'll start a petition to remove tourists who stand on the left of the escalators (when they should be standing on the right, walking on the left) from the Metro system. :)