MakeMeSustainable is a new green social networking site. Although entering a crowded field, the service wisely translates how greening your everyday habits saves money. It tallies dollar signs, trees, and carbon emissions to track changes in your usage of electricity, heating, transportation, and travel over many months. I like that it takes you directly to sites where you can achieve a goal instantly, such as by buying CFL bulbs or carbon credits, or downloading a power-saving app for your PC. And you can form and join groups based around your interests.
MakeMeSustainable builds a personal profile based upon your quick setup interview. If I already polluted a lot more, I'd get more tools for setting worthy green goals. I'm far from eco-perfect, but giving up my car last year was painful, so if I can't moan about it, then I at least want to brag a bit. But since I rely on a bike, the site didn't show my eco-progress or suggest how my transportation could get greener. For instance, it didn't ask if I rent cars or take taxis. But this service is only in beta testing and will evolve. I found Yahoo Green's action plan (more here) a bit more intuitive.
I'd also like MakeMeSustainable to show how my carbon footprint measures against national averages, which BeGreenNow, ZeroFootprint, and the Nature Conservancy's carbon calculator display.
MakeMeSustainable keeps tabs on your carbon costs.
Despite those wishes, MakeMeSustainable's efforts are an impressive start, especially for a tiny startup that is only beginning to secure outside funding. I plan to keep using it. Within the next few months, it will roll out a lifestyle section, forums for product reviews, and widgets for Facebook. Blog badges will help you to show off your sustainability. Green sites need to work together rather than reinventing the wheel to add new tools, and the makers of MakeMeSustainable seem to have the right idea. They plan to integrate their service with others, such as by later integrating Yelp business ratings into the embedded Google Maps. They might also add RSS tie-ins, browser add-ons, and a Twitter-like feature.
I also like that MakeMeSustainable pledges not to share your individual details with third parties and lets you register with OpenID. Should you ever tire of the site, its detailed privacy policy even offers an e-mail address where you can ask for your details to be deleted. That offer alone makes this a personally sustainable service.
Today, Yahoo launched two new sites to get people motivated to be environmentally responsible. The sites complement Yahoo's previous green offering 18seconds.org, which tracks fluorescent light bulb usage in the continental United States. The sites are information tools, and part of a contest to help the greenest city in the U.S. get greener.
The first of the new sites is Yahoo Green, which helps people create their own plans to go green, using a drag-and-drop building tool. Yahoo provides lifestyle actions in four categories, which range from air drying your clothes all the way up to buying and installing solar panels on your house. Users can sort through the various actions using filters, and the builder will automatically let them know how much they're cutting back on their carbon emissions. When done, users can pledge to make those changes, and send off their plans to friends and family.
Yahoo Green gives everyone a baseline of 9.44 tons of CO2 a year, although to find something a little closer to your situation you can use Carbon Counter, which is a free tool that lets you customize your carbon offsets based on your living space and how you travel. It also lets you know how much it would cost to offset the carbon by donating to various environmental organizations.
The other new site is Be a Better Planet, which acts as a landing page for 18seconds, Yahoo Green, and links to green tools on Yahoo Answers and Yahoo's mobile search platform oneSearch. The site is the launch pad for Yahoo's new promotion that tracks and awards the greenest city in the U.S. The winning city gets a fleet of hybrid taxis. Alternately, cities can choose to take the cash equivalent and put it into their own environmental programs.
To keep score, Yahoo is doling out points for interaction with the services listed on the Be a Better Planet page. Results are shown on a map, which will start displaying each city's scores starting tomorrow. Users can improve their city's score by continuing to use Yahoo's green-oriented services, although it's clear that larger cities get an advantage over the smaller ones, assuming their residents are Yahoo users.
Yahoo's Green Plan builder lets you make your own plan to save the planet, or at least start by using recycled paper.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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