If you graduated from college in the last couple of years, you will have heard of a gamut of social networking sites: Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook, to name a few. Even for those without freshly minted college degrees, these websites are hard to ignore - Facebook claims to have at least 90 million active users, and organizations as diverse as Amnesty International and Apple have established social networking presences. And while they're great for certain purposes - what did your friend do last weekend? which NYT's op-ed is he reading - they go only so far in connecting communities with very specific interests. Thus enters Business Fights Poverty, a website that aims to connect professionals who work on the business side of international development.
The trick for any social networking site, of course, is reaching a tipping point in terms of the number of members. It's something like going to a party - who will enter the room first, second, third, etc.? The opportunity facing Business Fights Poverty, though, is that no other organization has really tried to fill this niche yet. Perhaps the time is right for a Facebook for development.
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