Joe Green

From the day Facebook launched in 2004, the profile was the most critical page on the site.

Whatever you think of Facebook, you cannot fault it for lack of ambition.

Causes was founded with the mission of empowering anyone to change the world. Our model is based upon the belief that everyone has the power to have an outsized impact on the world by banding together with other like-minded individuals, taking direct action, and inspiring their friends and their friends' friends to join in.

Causes brings over 140 million people together to form the world's largest giving community. The belief that everyone has something to give is at the core of what we do; people just need a little inspiration, and to know that whoever they are, there is something meaningful they can do.

Grassroots organizing tends to be most available to big campaigns, but it's actually most useful to small ones. You can't win a presidential campaign without going on TV, but you can win a local election simply by organizing your community. NationBuilder levels the playing field.

People can care about changing the world. But what gets them to act is pressure and social reward.

Without social networks, you're not the coolest thing on the Christmas list, and you're not getting any bite.

Remember all of the 'me too' social networks built just to have a social feature Facebook and MySpace didn't have? I built one for political discussion called Essembly. It enabled unique and potentially transformative social interactions, but only 20,000 people ever used it.

The original dream of Facebook Platform was to enable developers to build experiences that were social at their core, like Facebook Photos, without having to build their own standalone social network.

Altruism is one of the most fundamentally social impulses, and doing things for others without expecting anything in return is core to what makes us human. This is why, from the day Facebook Platform launched in 2007, Causes has been honored to be one of the most popular applications, with over 140 million users.

If you had told me when I was at high school that one day I would be working for a for-profit company, let alone running one, I would have said you were crazy. But I am interested in how you can empower individuals to make change, and Causes is doing just that.

When all is said and done and the e-book is written about politics and the Internet, it is not going to be about the presidential election. It will be about the smaller elections in aggregate that have a huge effect on people's lives.