Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes, Obama's "online organizing guru" Deserves Big Props

You have to love a story about a 24-year old who made a monumental difference by helping Barak Obama to become president-elect of the United States. In other words, this young dude helped change the world.

His name is Chris Hughes and he was one of the three co-founders of Facebook, the runaway social networking phenom to which I am addicted. And I am 61.

Mr. Hughes left Facebook last February (taking stock options that are worth at least tens of millions with him) to become the "online organizing guru" for the Obama campaign, moving from Silicon Valley to Chicago. Obviously, in hindsight, the move was worth it. MyBarakObama.com was brilliant and brilliantly successful. Thanks so much, Chris.

The New York Times published his story in July calling him "The Facebooker Who Friended Obama"
and he came to my attention because
Beet.TV republished a two year old video interview with Hughes last week.

I have a new enthusiasm for the ways that the world is changing, and I'm inspired by young people like Chris who are making real changes happen.

Continuing on the Gen-X theme, I was also very moved by Heather Havrilesky's "open apology to boomers everywhere" on Salon.com. It was nice of her to speak so respectfully to her elders when she said, "Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it." ;)

It's a bright new day.

Cool Convergence & Browsing Bonus: Great TechCrunch-NetVibes Mashup

For your browsing pleasure...

In announcing the new NetVibes roll-out of the ability to create public personalized pages, the marvelous Michael Arrington also offered his own personalized, customized TechCrunch NetVibes page "featuring many of my favorite news feeds and a few widgets."

I offer this to you because it is a cool convergence. From my limited experience, NetVibes is my favorite customizable "home page;" but more importantly TechCrunch is my favorite source of information about the bleeding edge of Web 2.0. Scroll down on this TechCruch/NetVibes page to see, for example, the Alexa Widget showing TechCrunch ahead of Business Week and CNet in online viewership; or enjoy the build-in video references; and on and on.

If you're reading this, you'll probably find things of interest on the Netvibes.com/TechCrunch page. If nothing else, it's a great demo of the plug-and-play nature of the ever-expanding Web 2.0 socially-networked Internet.

Enjoy!

Build Your Own Social Network, The Buzz Du Jour

I made a post re the build-your-own-social-network platform Ning below, so this is just a small follow up because I couldn't resist passing along TechCrunch's quote of the NYTimes quoting Ning's founder, Marc Andreesen regarding Cisco's buyout of social network-building company Tribe.

Andreesen said, "The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches."

Be careful out there... ;)