Thursday, November 08, 2007

Ethical Offsets?

Carbon offsets remind people that there is an environmental price for airplane travel & other carbon emitting activities. But is the Greenhouse Effect the most pernicious evil the world currently faces?

I think not.

Social invites are the most pernicious evil the world currently faces.

How about a service to allow people to ethically offset the 'be my buddy' invites they send to their friends, family & colleagues?

For every invite sent, the offset service would randomly pick a penance, e.g. perhaps a small donation to a charity, or 50 push-ups, or visiting Grandma in the home.

People have to realize there are costs associated with friendship.

Blogged with Flock

1 comment:

Robert said...

Perhaps there could be a service where you could connect to people you "hate" ? So whenever you get an unwanted invite you would (perhaps automatically) send an invite for that person to join your network of people-who-are-not-my-friends.
If nothing else such a network would provide material for dozens of Ph.D. students... Inevitably there will be lots of interesting conflicts between the friend and not-friend networks!
Yes it is really time to step up to richer notions of the edges of those "social" graphs. Just "is-a-friend-of" or "knows" is no longer cool.