Top 10 Reasons Why BFA Has Facebook & Twitter Shaking In Their Boots.

We don’t like to brag. It’s not very FA. But we do like to inspire. And sometimes what it takes to inspire is to do a bit of the ol’ rah rah. So here we are. Five weeks in or so. Halloween day (happy to ya). And it occurs to us that Facebook and Twitter should be afraid. Very afraid. Here’s 10 reasons why.

1. We’re a lot smaller than Facebook and Twitter. People love small things. Just look at those little chihuahua dogs. They’re small as hell. And people LOVE those things.

2. Here’s a FApost from yesterday. Show me one post on Facebook or Twitter that beats it: (From FArdubsy – “Put extra money in the meter outside of Starbucks this morning. Figured it’d help one of my fellow latte seekers out.” (She’s currently sitting at an FAvalue of 87 for that by the way.)

3. Point 2 brings up point 3 (this point, in case you lost count already). Our community can give values to posts. Actual numbers. Not just “like” or “comment.” And those contribute to an Awesome Quotient score. And guess what? We have comments TOO. In your FACES!

4. Our posts aren’t just posts. They’re good DEEDS. Let’s see… Spend your time to tell the world you are watching a show on HBO or eating a popsicle? Or expend valuable typing energy telling the world that you just volunteered at the SPCA and thereby inspire others to do their best for fellow humans too? Hmmmm, tough one. Oh hey Facebook, looks like you just peed your pants. Would you like a nice absorbent towel? Here, let us get you one.

5. Our site is WAY more colorful. Color is neat.

6. Our site has a fun little flash animation in the corner. Fun little flash animations are fun.

7. We let our users automatically link their posts to both of your sites. Rendering your sites completely useless. We know that doesn’t make much sense. But we like the sound of it. And the point is, Biz Stone and Evan Williams are totally FREAKING OUT WITH FEAR AT THIS. That’s right, Biz, #7 has YOUR number! Boo! Yah! (Get it? Boo-yah?)

8. We were on #designchat on last Wednesday night. I haven’t ever seen the founder of Facebook on Design Chat. Have YOU? No. Proof ALONE that they’re scared. Twitter hasn’t been on their either. Yet WE were featured on the hottest design chat going. Via FAhupajoob and mashable.com/chat. You guys must be just full-on JELL-O inside right now. The fear is just killing you.

9. Speaking of Mashable, Pete Cashmore himself tweeted his 7 trillion users that BFA was being featured on Design Chat. Has Mashable EVER tweeted or covered EITHER Facebook or Twitter? We think you know the answer to that. You guys are going DOWN!

10. We have something like 1,400 members. Facebook and Twitter have hundreds of millions more. Ever hear of a little concept called Quality over Quantity? Yeah, we thought so. It’s probably on wikipedia if you haven’t.

Can An Upstart Social Network Really Inspire Us To Be Better People?

Here we are. Closing in on being live for three whole weeks. Barely any time at all in the lifecycle of most things. But a social network isn’t most things. It lives in a world of RAPID change. A world where posts are forgotten in minutes, sent way below the fold and made irrelevant in the blink of an eye. Where it feels like we’re watching the evolution of functionality under time-lapse photography thanks to crazy-smart developers and interactive creatives/producers constantly striving to make the last mindbending innovation obsolete. Where the power of Facebook and Twitter daily set the bar ever-higher due to their tireless management and maintenance and brilliance. So when you’re playing in this realm, three weeks is actually a pretty long time. Enough time to fairly take a minute to look at the progress thusfar and give ourselves a grade. And a time to question what we might need to add, what we might need to take away, and how much more we might want to bleed our savings accounts to do so. So here goes: Personally I’m pretty satisfied. Without any paid-PR and with the radically polarizing word “fucking” smack-dab in the middle of our name and url, we’re already over 1,200 members strong. With one developer working when he can find the time after his super-dmanding day-job, we manage to answer most requests and hurdle obstacles without crashing (no jinxing, please). And perhaps most encouraging, we notice that members who haven’t posted in weeks occasionally do come back and write a FAdeed. It’s also encouraging that people seem to understand the over-arching concept here and for the most part y’all are voting on FAdeeds accordingly. Which leads to perhaps the only question that matters: Can an upstart social network really help us be better people? Can Be Fucking Awesome dot com work its way into our subconscious and remind us to look for opportunities to carry out a Fucking Awesome deed – that which we do for the benefit of others – so that we may post it later and network socially around it? Speaking for myself, I say it can. And if more of you agree, then that’s all we might need to keep this baby going. To add simple but key functionality to befuckingawesome.com’s interactivity and fun-factor such as our comment system. (Coming very soon – and we think you’ll find it very FA – http://twitpic.com/l9xsv). To be satisfied with baby steps. And remain fully conscious that even Twitter and Facebook, MySpace and Friendster (remember them) had to walk before they could run. Last weekend when we posted our blog entry, it was gratifying to see the comments come in. So thank you for that. And this week we’re hoping for more of the same. So thank you for reading. Thank you in advance for helping us spread the word with your blogs and Tweets and re-Tweets. And thank you for staying FA.

Starting A Social Network Built Around Doing Good But With An F-Bomb In Its Name? What The F Am I Thinking?!

Ambitious. That’s one thing it could be called. Stupid. That’s another. But after two weeks being live with Be Fucking Awesome dot com – the first social network designed for doing good – I’m choosing to simply call it A MASSIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCE.

It’s been a ride. That’s for sure. At first it was all good. We got some exciting press courtesy Josh Spear. He’s got a big blog following and his review was pretty sweet. Thanks Josh. Then we got a great write-up on the front page of the Denver Egotist. Very nice. And we got a couple of other nice web-press-hits too. And our Google Analytics were looking good. This was just one week in, and it was feeling nothing short of FA.

Then week two started. I was hoping for more press and promotion, more steady growth of new users and FAdeeds. Well, being raised at CP+B I’m just like a lot of Crispinites – I never learn. This time the lesson that I hadn’t learned was “be careful what you ask for.” Because last Tuesday the 6th, we got more press. This time from Asylum.com – another glowing review. Pretty cool, right? Well… let’s just say that depends on who you ask. Because all of a sudden, our burgeoning userbase went from a demographic of those who cleary understood that the site was about posting good deeds, to one full of Maxim-magazine fratboy types who were into it to post stuff that they thought was funny or “awesome” from a “I just took a giant shit” or “I just banged two chicks” POV. And not only did this demographic get into it, they LOVED it. On Tuesday the 6th alone we had something like 12,000 views and at one time more than 1,000 concurrent users. But the content being posted spawned a major dilemma for me. “Do I ride it out? Do I trust the system? What if so many of this new type is onboard now that they’ll hush the others? What if they vote up the nonsense FAdeeds to the point where it gets out of the original vision entirely? Do I edit it? Do I delete posts and kick people off the site? But wait… they’re not WRONG. Nowhere does it dictate what is an “awesome deed” and it’s open to interpretation… What do I DO? Have we created a MONSTER?!”

So I decided to ride it out and see. Will the community police itself? It could. Would these gorillamask.net users get tired of it? Or will they adopt it completely and will I be the one who adopts THEIR vision of it instead? By the end of Wednesday it started to sort itself out again. The FAdeeders who seemed to love the site for its ability to inspire people to do good for real, were taking back over. Nice. Aaaaah.

Then, Chris, via Rick (two of our crack team of developers) sent word that we even got covered by Tosh.0 on COMEDY CENTRAL! Wow! Too bad Tosh totally PANNED US. Too bad Tosh clearly didn’t take the time to look past the F-Bomb. Too bad Tosh HAS SUCH MASSIVE READER/FOLLOWERSHIP! Shit. Bummer. Oh well, file under “no PR is bad PR / critics are often wrong” and get back on the positive train. Phew.

And here we are today. A snowy Saturday around 15 degrees 1,500 feet above Boulder – almost four days after that pivotal Tueday here in the early days of BFA, and it does seem to be finding balance again. True, there’s still a certain amount of FAdeeds being posted that are either lies, foolery or just flat obscene; as well as a lot of voting UP of FAdeeds of this sort, but I’m choosing to have faith. To have faith that it will find balance, police itself and stay the course.

Or maybe I’m just a Fucking Idiot. Thanks for reading. And stay FA.

Going And Growing Global. Google Analytics, Very FA.

Thank You Denver Egotist. You Are What We’d Call FA.