Facebook Enhances Its Suicide Prevention Outreach, Adds Services For Vets And Military Personnel

Corporate Social Responsibility, facebook, social, suicide, TC

Screen shot 2012-05-09 at 15.18.16Facebook’s role as a social network for close to one billion people can be a weighty responsibility, and today the company took one more step in the kind of social outreach activities that befit a company with that kind of audience. It has formed a new partnership with Blue Star Families and the Department of Veterans Affairs to create a special set of services aimed at vets and other military personnel, to help prevent suicide.

Engineers at Facebook have developed a special solution, the company says, that will be able to identify military families and military personnel on the social network. What it will mean is that when friends and families of those military people report harmful or suicidal content, posters of that content will receive information specifically related to crisis services for U.S. military people.

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RankBoards, A Pinterest For Opinions, Brings Ranking Into The Imagery Equation

glen moriarty, rankboards, social, Startups, TC

Screen shot 2012-05-08 at 2.04.28 PMThere are quite a few Pinterest clones out there, and to be quite honest with you, there’s nothing wrong with a clone if it adds value in a fundamentally different way than the service it’s cloning. This is why I’m totally amped to tell you about RankBoards. Yes, I know, it does borrow a bit from Pinterest in terms of large-scale representative imagery, but it brings in a new layer of awesomeness in the form of ranking.

Ranking is something inherent in us, whether we talk about it or are conscious of it. When someone asks you about your favorite tech blogs, you may list off six or seven, but in your heart you know that TechCrunch sits right at the top of that list. (Wink.)

RankBoards takes our natural push to rank things and throws it up onto the internet. Basically, you create boards in the same way you would on Pinterest, but instead of a collage of categorized items, you’re asked to rank them from best to worst, favorite to least favorite, etc.

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