Prelude Interactive

From my researcher’s TweetBlind ™ I was able to watch as Britt Bravo sent out the call to her followers for examples of non-profit iPhone apps.  She published the results which were picked up and commented on by various luminaries in the NPTech community.  All this happened in a very social, viral way as a great example of how social media is supposed to work.

The iPhone is a very popular mobile platform for the Twitter set, but I wish she had expanded her search for great non-profit mobile apps.  Or great non-profit social apps.  Remember, there’s still a few billion people using beat-up phones with tiny screens.  Design for them! Also, read what Jan Chipchase has to say about it.

People who are excited about the mobile giving and social actions revolution (happening real soon now?) should remember that to do the most good and have the greatest impact, your technology needs to be architected in such a way that it is flexible and applicable to all the platforms that exist now and all the platforms that will exist next year.

How?  Publish a well documented, well designed, and open interface.  Examples of these include Google Maps, Twitter, and Social Actions.  Developing a worthwhile, stable service is hard enough.  Do you also want to become an iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and web developer?  Sure you do, maybe just for the fun of it.  But in the interest of getting your great idea to market quickly and widely, leave the specific implementations up to the platform experts.

Britt’s post, in fact, broadened towards the end to include a few of the non-iPhone things going on in the bleeding edge right now, among them the Extraordinaries and the Change The Web challenge.   She also uncovered some iPhone apps I wasn’t aware of that are built on great ideas.  Turn every workout into a fundraiser?  My cause would probably wither from lack of funding given my exercise patterns lately, but there are a lot of triatheletes in Austin alone whose 200+ training sessions per year could be harnessed for good!  And also probably to produce electricity!

In summary, think beyond the iPhone.  Build the foundation and the service and then let the open source, open interface model carry your idea to the far reaches.  An Extrarodinaries app for pagers.  Volunteer Match in Lynx.  Micro-donations from your gambling card in Vegas (“This pull is for diabetes!”).

Remember, I’m a grumpy gus who has a G1 Android phone from TMobile.  I’m part of the unwashed, non iPhone having masses.  And I usually have 20 minutes of $5 to spare.