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updated

Serial entrepreneur Sean Parker’s new philanthropy focused company, Project Agape, launches tonight, with a special version of its software tailored for Facebook users.

It is called Causes on Facebook.

Just as significant as its launch, however, is its intent to showcase the strengths of Facebook’s new “Platform,” a set of tools to allow developers to build applications upon Facebook. More on that in a second.

Project Agape is the most ambitious social network we’ve seen that lets people mobilize around causes of their choice. It has been secretive until now, providing a sneak preview to a handful of people, including VentureBeat (see coverage). Even today, its release for Facebook’s platform is a limited one. A more extensive version will be released next month.

A competitor, Change.org, launched just two days ago (see our coverage). That network focuses on political change. Its service tries to tap users to choose slates of politicians and other recommendations to effect change. But that site is bare bones, and still has relatively few users.

While Agape too is new, its advantage is formidable. Its software is by far the most integrated of any third-party company into the Facebook platform. Any of Facebook’s more than 24 million users can select Agape from a menu, and with one-click install it on their Facebook toolbar for continuous use. See early screenshots at bottom.

Here’s how it works:

Called “Causes on Facebook,” it allows you to create a cause, or promote an existing one to their friends You can pick from 1.5 million non-profits in the U.S. It uses Facebook’s “feed” feature to notify friends when you’ve joined a new cause. Finally, it allows you to promote the cause in other ways, building up points through a reward system, letting you show off virtual trophies that you win on your profile page after say, donating money. Ultimately, it wants to make it easier to raise money for causes. It launches with formal partnerships with ten non-profits.

It plans to use Facebook’s “social graph,” or the network of relationships users have with their friends, and their friends’ friends. The point is to mirror real life, where activists and other fund-raisers reach out to influencers and ask them to reach out to their own followers. (We wrote about this in our first post). Facbook Photos and Facebook Events have done well by building on this. “Cesar Chavez would ask a farmer to gather their friends in their hut, and he would talk to them,” explains Joe Green who co-founded Agape with Parker.

The two go further, arguing that young people have become alienated from political and social causes precisely because there has been no way to mobilize online. They point to an “erosion of social capital” caused by modern lifestyles. A decline in local chapter-style organizations has left a void, they say.

Parker’s convinced this will work because Facebook’s users exhibit a higher level of engagement than most sites. About 50 percent visit the site daily, with an average use-time of more than a hour.

One advantage Agape has is how it sits on top of Facebook’s platform. New internet companies find it hard to attract users from scratch. Most try a “sucking” strategy. Photo, video and other companies, for example, let users place so-called widgets on sites like MySpace, and by trying to suck those users back to their own sites with links, registrations and so on. Agape’s method is different because it seeks to remain native to Facebook, with style and features that make it look like just another Facebook application. It uses Facebook’s mark-up language, “FBML.” Its icon is similar to that of Facebook Photos and Groups.

The close partnership stems from Parker’s relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook. Parker was an early collaborator at Facebook, before leaving the company more than a year ago. Green, meanwhile, was Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard.

“Causes on Facebook,” is just one of 80 applications built by 65 companies on Platform. Zuckerberg announced more details about the platform just now during his keynote address. He emphasized that Facebook will encourage companies to make money from advertising and other transactions, giving them free access to the “canvas” pages of their applications to do as they please. This contrasts with the more closed nature of other networks, such as MySpace, which notoriously shut down access to Photobucket when that company tried to promote sponsorships. Zuckerberg also called on to the stage representatives from Microsoft, Amazon and Slide to announce integration partnerships.

Update: One attendee, I think it was Saar Gur from Charles River Ventures, went so far as to say this might represent the “end of Web 2.0.” Most new consumer Internet companies will feel forced to launch from within Facebook, because of its huge base of young, interested, experiment-happy users. If you can’t succeed there, can you hope to do so outside? So Facebook becomes the platform. Provocative thought, and clearly an overstatement, but it stayed with me.

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Change.org, a boot-strapped San Francisco social networking company that seeks to help motivate you for good causes, has launched its “politics” feature.

The launch is perfect timing for the upcoming presidential primaries, but it is meant to serve a permanent cycle of political engagement. Also, it gets to market before its flashier competitor, Project Agape. Project Agape, yet to launch, lets people mobilize and raise funds for causes (we had a sneak peak). That company is co-founded by entrepreneur Sean Parker and has venture backing of more than $2 million.

Change.org is less polished, and scrappier — but it has a good chance because people are passionate about politics. Here’s how it works: You search its database for a cause, for example “net neutrality,” or “global warming.” Change.org then shows you the causes in those subject areas that the existing user community has prioritized. It also shows you news items, and the person who first created the “cause”. If there’s a cause you believe in, you can create your own cause.

Take, for example, global warming (image shown below). Change.org shows the top three anti-global warming groups, as voted by its existing community: The League of Conservation Voters, Greenpeace and the Nature Conservancy. If you want to “vote” for the cause, Change.org suggests you donate money to each one of these top-ranked groups. You don’t have to — you can donate to a single group or pick a group lower down on the list — but the idea is to pick the top three picked by the community (the community collectively makes better decisions, so the logic goes).

It shows you profiles of people who have donated the most, and the number of votes (corresponding to donations) each topic has gotten.

Change launched a non-profit side of its service a few months ago, but didn’t push the sort of viral marketing tactics that it unleashes tomorrow. Like Tagged, Facebook, Flixster and MySpace in its early days, Change.org will hit you with a viral campaign when you register. It automatically suggests you invite your friends. Founder Ben Rattray, a former political consultant in Washington, DC, said he has a team of six, and he is looking for a first round of venture funding.

For certain causes, such as net neutrality, Change.org’s top results are the campaigns of politicians partial to the cause. So Change.org effectively creates a political slate, encouraging people to donate to those politicians. In some cases, Change.org picks out an anti-politician to oppose. For net neutrality, for example, it recommends a donation to the opponent of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who is notoriously ignorant on the subject.

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Project Agape, as we mentioned earlier, is a site that wants to empower people to further their political or social cause using the Internet.

The site remains secretive for now, but we spent some time with co-founders Sean Parker and Joe Green last week, and got a sneak peak at what they are doing, including a demonstration of their site. We came away impressed. This site is likely to have significant impact on philanthropic causes. We’d recommend any non-profit, or even for-profits working on good social causes, to get in touch with this company. You could call Agape a “meta” non-profit.

To piece things together, Project Agape is the new name of Philotic, a company we’d mentioned in January, when it got funding from the Founders Fund in January. Parker and Green confirmed they raised $2.35 million from that firm. Parker, 27, who is a partner at Founders Fund, is also a co-founder of the company. This puts Parker in the highly unusual position of investor and investee, but then Parker is an unconventional guy (as mentioned before). Philotic, in turn, was the evolution of an older company, called Essembly.com, which was founded by Green. That company was restructured into Philotic when Parker and the Founders Fund invested earlier this year. The Essembly.com site is still active.

Here’s the history: Green (pictured left), 23, a roommate of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s at Harvard, almost became a co-founder of Facebook. However, he’d gotten in enough trouble with Zuckerberg, when they launched facemash.com, a site that popped up two student photos and asked people to choose who was more attractive (see our early story on Facebook, which recounts the history). Zuck was put on probation, and Green got a slap on the wrist and was let off. In 2004, instead of joining Facebook, Green decided to join the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry. Green, self-deprecatingly, notes that not only did he lose the states of Arizona and Nevada for Kerry, but also a Facebook stake worth in the many millions of dollars.

But Green, whose eyes this past Friday evening were bloodshot from overwork, is following his passion: Giving people a way to get their voice heard, at a time when political alienation and disengagement are greater than ever. Citizens perceive politics as dominated by money. Philanthropies and political parties court the older and wealthy, because they have the dollars; the average person is left with no medium to participate.

Green wants to change that. In 2003, he tried to convince Zuckerberg, his computer science roommate, to build a social network dedicated to empowering people in the political process. Zuck wasn’t interested in politics at the time. So after the Kerry stint, Green started Essembly.com. He built it over the summer of 2005, with six engineers. There, he experimented online with basic precepts of political mobilization: You start out with minimal commitments, getting people to answer questions. The more people give of themselves, the more you reward them, and the more you reward them, the more they get involved.

In short, Green dreamt of creating something akin to the townhall of the Internet, a democratic ideal where people’s voices are hard — and a goal talked about for years by early Internet visionaries, like John Perry Barlow — who hoped the Internet would be a transformative force for the good. But the Internet of political motivation remained elusive. Organizations like MoveOn.org exist, but they remain relatively small compared to the scale of a Yahoo or even a Facebook.

Last year, Green was in his hometown of LA, and hooked up with Sean Parker (pictured left), who’d left Facebook, and was spending time in LA before joining The Founders Fund as a venture capitalist. They hit it off, and started talking about Green’s vision. It resonated with Parker, who’d been thinking about viral causes since his days at Plaxo, and more recently, about online democracy. Parker returned to SF to work for The Founders Fund, and convinced Green to come to Berkeley. Parker went to work to help transform Essembly into a new company that could be invested in by his firm. He and the firm restructured Essembly, buying out its old shareholders, and placating them by giving them a small share in the company (Parker had learned this art the hard way — after helping Zuck do something similar with Facebook, but Facebook had been dogged by a lawsuit for years afterward). They kept two of the original engineers, and brought in two others to the new Berkeley company.

One of their goals: To change the model of fund-raising, to make it more efficient. Many charitable organizations absorb 20 to 30 percent of their received donations in overhead expenses. Online fund-raising can be more efficient. Yet only $5 billion of donations are online, even if it is growing quickly. Some $260 billion is given to charities each year, and 75 percent of that is from individuals. Most of what we speculated two weeks ago about Project Agape was accurate, though we’d say Project Agape is more Facebook, less Friendster.

Green is founding president of Agape, and Parker is chairman. They are co-CEOs. Green hangs out mostly in Berkeley, and Parker spends about a third of his time at the office, the rest of it traveling.

Finally, a note on the origin of the word Philotic: It comes from the Philotic Web, a metaphysical construct of the Ender’s Game series of works by science fiction author Orson Scott Card. In that work, kids who think they are playing a game find out that they are really being used to fight a major war. Only the kids have a chance of winning, because they’re the ones who can take the risks necessary to win the war. With two twenty-somethings attempting to revolutionize the world of giving with Project Agape, these Philotic Web references are more than apt.

Entrepreneur Sean Parker’s latest undertaking is Project Agape, a secretive start-up working to empower people to further their political or social cause using the Internet.

Parker, 27, isn’t sharing much publicly about the company yet, but it’s worth noting because Parker tends to make waves when he gets serious about something.

There was controversial music-sharing site Napster, where he was co-founder; the contact updating service, Plaxo, where he was also co-founder, and which rubbed lots of people the wrong way until it mellowed recently; and Facebook, where he joined up with Mark Zuckerberg early on and saw it emerge into one of the biggest social networking companies of the day. He’s also been articulate about start-up financing models.

Om Malik first found out about Project Agape a few weeks ago. VentureBeat spoke with Parker, but he’s committed to secrecy for now. The Founders Fund, the venture capital firm Parker recently joined as partner, has invested in the Berkeley, Ca. based Project Agape. Parker hasn’t left the firm, but has poured most of his time into the new venture. We’ll update when he has more to say. But here is some context, and some clues.

Notable is that Parker joined the VC world because he was exhausted with start-ups, he told us during an interview three months ago. At that time, we could tell Parker was getting impassioned about viral communication — so we’re not surprised at his quick embarking into the start-up world again. Here’s a snippet from that previous piece:

Parker also came up with much of what we see as the Facebook News Feed, and he believes that format is the future of communication on the Web. “The social graph,” he says, referring to the connection people have with others through multiple degrees, “is the critical ingredient.”

In other words, Project Agape is likely to use your extended personal network, first popularized by Friendster, to let you further your cause. (Parker was close friends with Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams.) Now, you join that with Facebook’s “newsfeed” feature, which updates you with the activities of your friends, and Project Agape may have something interesting. It’s difficult to see how this could be extended beyond social and political activism, because people wouldn’t respond very well to businesses using this sort of thing. But the number of page views created for advertising could be significant, either way.

So far, we’re just speculating, but more hints come from Michael Arrington, who has just published something based on an interview with Parker:

New sites like Change.org and dotherightthing and Six Degrees help people talk about issues online, but they don’t go far enough in using virality to get new users and get them actually doing things. Parker wants the kind of activity around these organizations that Facebook sees - tens of thousands of new daily users and hours and hours of social interactions. The result, he says, will be a much more efficient engine for organizations to get volunteers and raise money.