Update: Here’s a followup post with some more thoughts on the nonprofit community’s relationship with social networking tools.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past week about Causes leaving MySpace and becoming a Facebook-only application…

Thanks for this conversation!

I understand your frustration and hear you loud and clear on the fact that the Causes episode isn’t a new issue. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a unique opportunity to connect with a new audience of nonprofits about using open source now and thinking about, building towards, and helping call for a more open web in the future.

I do believe it’s unreasonable to expect all organizations to use only self-hosted, open source, or in-house tools (and am not saying that’s what you are calling for either), so I’m hoping we can use the Causes example as a case study in balancing what’s done in 3rd party places and what isn’t. For example, ensuring there is correct information about your organization on other platforms, that there are enough tools/options/logos/messages/etc that individuals can campaign for you, connect to you, and so on. But that registration with the organizations, sign ups for campaigns/newsletters/alerts, and actions are handled by the organization’s site so the data can be retained and monitored. Obviously the actual case studies would be more fleshed out, but that’s just an example.

Again, thanks for continuing the conversation!

At Netsquared Year 2, I led a session called “If your nonprofit has a social media strategy, why?” My argument was that the space is too volatile to make big investments in any one platform, particularly when there’s so much work to be done inside our organizations, educating executives and staff as to the now two way nature of the internet. But I also pointed out that this landscape is going to change. Facebook, being the right thing at the right time, might well get enough of a foothold to still be around in five or ten years. But, in the meantime, the social functionality that they provide will grow more and more omnipresent in our applications and networking environments. Facebook knows this, too — that’s why they bought Friendfeed and are pushing Facebook Connect. They’re not going to beat Google’s move to democratize web 2.0 communication (and open-sourcing Wave is a huge step in that direction) by saying “come to our site instead”.

With all of that in mind, I am sorry to hear about non-profits who will now have to regroup on how they maintain the relationship with their MySpace constituents and recover from the rug that’s been pulled out from under them. But I advise everyone to hedge your investments. This type of upheaval will keep on coming. It doesn’t mean don’t do it; it just means, have a backup plan. Social networking will not ultimately be tied to any particular web address.