Beth Kanter asks in her most recent post, “How will the youngest billionaire use his new found wealth for social causes?”

Well, Mark, come visit. We’ve got over 450 ideas for you…

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We at GlobalGiving are big fans of Facebook—while we’re interested in building applications that support our projects, we also just love to have fun and see what our friends are up to.

I personally love the Flixster application in Facebook, where I can compare my movie tastes with everyone I know and get friends’ recommendations on movies I haven’t seen.

Why Flixster is awesome:

A) It’s easy and fun to rate, share, and compare movie tastes—the Facebook application is simple, simple, simple.

B) Users can compete with others in movie trivia, and Facebook users LOVE to compete—it turns out that I know more than I’d like to know about Adam Sandler movies.

For the philanthropy sector, the meteoric rise of Flixster, iLike, and Scrabulous is informative, even if they are free applications.

The lesson: Facebook users want to play, so let them play.

About a year ago, I asked Facebook’s team if we could transform the NCAA Basketball Pool promoted through Facebook into a fundraising application, where participating users could pay $10 each into competitive pools and raise funds for their favorite GlobalGiving projects.

That was before Facebook opened its platform up to developers, so this year I’m issuing a challenge to developers at large:

Calling ALL Slashdotters, Facebookies, OpenSocialites, ESPNers, Bloggers, and Friends—if you have ideas for a fun, simple, and collaborative application where users get to play around and still contribute to a good cause, let us know. If we really like your idea, we’ll invite you to blog about it.

Your ideas don’t have to deal with the NCAA—that’s just my idea. Be creative!

	Click on the pictures above to learn more about these particular projects.

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