I am not a great fan of regurgitating other peoples information but David Sag over at Carbon Planet had some interesting news over at his blog today:

Social network sites have traditionally been seen as either playthings for bored office workers, dating site equivalents for lusty students, helper kits internet-stalkers or fronts for the CIA, but today I think I actually found something useful in facebook. Carpooling.

Previously, online ride-sharing was a risky and difficult endeavour for any user. Finding a ride on a website like Craigslist (currently the most popular ride-sharing site) would be fraught with uncertainty and hazard. There was simply no way to find out about a potential ride-sharing partner - your driver could be your real-estate agent or a newly released axe-murderer. He (or she?) could come pick you up on time, or leave you hanging. There was no accountability, no trust and consequently no real step-change in the culture of ride-sharing in the real world. Car owners still prefer to drive empty cars over long distances, paying hefty gas costs, and passengers still have to desperately beg for rides, rent cars or suffer a long, expensive bus/train ride. Everyone still loses.

Social-networking has changed the game. This disruptive technology has made it possible for people to establish trust in an online environment, thereby shattering the bottleneck for online-ridesharing. And Facebook Carpool, the new ride-sharing application that is embedded into the Facebook interface, is the first sophisticated utility to take advantage.

Resource use optimisation is the name of the game here. If I can find someone already going past my house to the airport (tomorrow afternoon say) then, by sharing a ride with them I will save both money and CO2, and, to be honest, might even make a new friend to play facebook scrabble with too. — DS

Thanks David. Cool post; cool find.