Actics.com, the "Ethical Facebook”
by Petz Scholtus, Barcelona, Spain on 10.23.07
The recent craze about social networks like Facebook hasn’t calmed down a bit. On the contrary, even green social networks are popping up like mushrooms with a special theme for each interest. The question is which one to join? Which one will win the popularity contest?
Only last week we featured the latest community orientated network Tree-nation, and here’s another newcomer for this week: Actics.com, aligning actions and ethics.
Actics is the world's first online ethical rating tool pioneering the new trend in ethical awareness and social responsibility.
Whether you are a business or an individual, Actics provides you with an ethical reality check and helps you turn your ethical visions into authentic actions. By signing up to this free social network, your corporate values will shine in the spotlight- a type of transparency more and more in demand, no matter what industry you belong to. It also works the other way around for you. If you are the one looking for a restaurant, lawyer or school, you can check out the ones with a high Actics rating and the ethical values important to you.
How does is work? Like with any other social network, you register and define who you are for your profile. Since this one is all about actions and ethics, you get to choose your corporate or personal values and state how you act them out. It is then up to your friends, clients or investors to rate you out of 100 for how true you are to your values. To help you out, they can also send you suggestions and endorse you. A great feature of this software is that a plugin, showing your ethical performance, can be integrated into your website or your company’s intranet if you want to share your results with a bigger network.
Nicolai Peitersen, an economist, who used to work for the Danish central bank and the investment bank J.P. Morgan before he founded Actics in 2005, believes ethics has become a competitive differentiator today:
We're in the middle of an ethical economy where companies experience an increasing pressure from customers and investors to make a stand on what ethics mean to them. Actics gives companies the opportunity to choose their own ethical values, be measured by them and involve their stakeholders in a process that improves their ability to act in accordance with their values while drawing their stakeholders closer.
So sign up to Actics.com and choose your values: Benevolence, Care, Confidentiality, Consistence, Devotion, Empathy, Environmentalism, Fairness, Integrity, Loyalty, Moderation,Prudenc, Respect, Sociabilit, Transparency,…? via: Tipser Alice from Clownfish ::Actics
More social networks on TreeHugger:
::Treehugger’s picks ::Changents ::MakeMeSustainable ::Tree-nation
i would stick to blog like here at treehugger because facebook is too messy and difficult to use.
These things likely won't last, in my opinion, because not only do they have to get critical mass, with open applications having been available for Facebook and now MySpace, someone could just come along and write the equivalent for FB and MS to allow you to do the same thing while piggybacking on your current network and keeping everything centralized.
And what's with the judgement? Is this social "networking" or social "condemnation"? How far do you think networkers would get if they had to review everybody they met and publicly state it? There's going to be a very limited and lonely group of people (I know that sounds like an oxymoron) in the self-admiration society before long on this site and you can figure out what'll happen to it. Ethics might be a business differentiator, but public opinion polls aren't even that overwhelming for it. Human interaction? Well, wouldn't we all like to think the human race were so noble, even if we only picked out the supposedly good green ones?