One of the big problems in building a movement is trying to get people to do “less” of something. If it’s morally wrong, you shouldn’t just do less of it, you shouldn’t do it at all! Without the moral clarity of “murder is wrong,” people just keep doing what they’re doing.

This is a big problem for issues like climate change, rampant consumerism, pollution, trash, etc. “Pollute less” or “buy less” simply isn’t cutting it.

These issues need to be framed into one thing that eventually everyone can agree is bad. Planet abuse.

This has been done before. Child abuse. It wasn’t always a bad thing, but today many things, like striking a child in anger are widely regarded as wrong. Very few think kids should be forced to work. However, there is controversy on spanking children, and the age line of what constitutes molesting a child keeps moving. But if you ask someone “is child abuse wrong?” 100% will say yes.

If we started to talk about “planet abuse” we could eventually get a lot of people to agree that it is wrong, and then we can fight to define exactly what planet abuse is. Some things will be clear, and others will be murky and change over time. “You can’t do that, it’s planet abuse!”

I just googled this phrase, and apparently it’s never been used before. Let’s change that.

This came out of a discussion with Aaron Swartz.

With act.ly petitions, I’m finding that a lot of activists just want people to retweet something, and it’s not necessarily a petition. People were actually targeting petitions at themselves just so they could use the other act.ly functionality, even though all they really wanted was for people to tweet some specific text in support of a cause. So I made act.ly retweets to better do that. You can use this for pledges, or links you want people to retweet, or your own email petitions you want people to tweet about… anything really.

It’s very similar to the petitions, it tracks the people who recruited the most retweeters, it lets you put a lot more information on the act.ly page (including videos and links to donation pages) than just the 140 chars. There is a digg-like embeddable widget you can put on your own site. You get the fun Google Map, and you can have the checkbox to follow you when someone tweets, along with auto-following anyone who does tweet.

Check it out: http://act.ly/retweets and tweet me feedback @jgilliam.

Also, Nancy Scola interviewed me about the first 3 months of act.ly, what’s working and what isn’t, for TechPresident this week. There’s some good info in there on effective ways to use act.ly petitions.

Twitter is planning to make retweets part of the API, but the way they are planning to do it fundamentally misunderstands the way people are retweeting. Sometimes, people want to just amplify exactly what the other person is saying. Twitter’s proposed changes handle that well. But people are also using RT to add an additional comment, sometimes as simple as “wow,” and sometimes it’s more of a public reply like this retweet from me:

“it’s rude *not* to tweet during #wlip RT @baratunde If I live tweet during We Live In Public, will the universe collapse? #wlip”

Dan Zarrella goes more into the specifics of what’s wrong with the proposed changes.

With act.ly and Tweet Progress, I’ve spent a good deal of time with the Twitter API, and I think there is a very elegant solution to this problem that also fixes replies.

In the same way that Twitter ditched “replies” for “mentions”, they should ditch the concept of a reply to a tweet, and instead let people “attach” or “refer” to a specific tweet, which would then be included along with the new tweet.

This fixes a number of different problems.
1. It handles all the situations that RT is currently being used
2. It gives people a full 140 characters to respond or add their own commentary to another tweet.
3. Conversation threading, which is currently a total mess, is now much more explicit and will probably even work.

This is a good user experience because some third party clients are trying to do it, but it doesn’t work very well because it’s basically guess work. Twitter can make this explicit and solve several problems at once, rather than create a new problem by mangling retweets.

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Togo, UK, US, and Zambia.

Wow.

I saw Clay Johnson’s post last week about Twitter being the future of email marketing. I’ve always found it’s easier to show than to explain, so I built a petition site (with Jesse Haff, the designer from Brave New Films) that takes full advantage of Twitter.

Meet act.ly.

It’s very simple. Here’s how it works. You sign a petition by tweeting it, and other people can sign the petition just be re-tweeting it. There’s no need to go to the act.ly site, except to start a petition. If you are re-tweeted, you get credit for the referral, and will show up in the “Smokin’ Recruiters” link on act.ly.

We put one petition up last night just to work out the bugs: http://act.ly/1

But here’s the coolest part about doing petitions with act.ly. You target your petition to another Twitter user, so each time someone signs, the tweet shows up in their mentions. It’s insanely viral. Then, all the targeted person needs to do is click on the act.ly link and log in with their Twitter account to respond! Act.ly then sends a DM to the person who started the petition to verify if it’s completed.

So you can go from outrage to petition idea to people signing in about 2 minutes. And we track right on the petition page how long it’s been with no response.

We’ll be adding analytics, similar to what people have come to expect from email marketing. There are some extremely cool things possible with Twitter analytics because nearly the entire social graph is public. Things we’ve been trying to track with email for years that just weren’t possible, are now possible with Twitter.

Recent events have made it clear there is huge potential to tweet change. Act.ly can help.

UPDATE: There’s more at TechPresident.