CA2736282A1 - Method and system for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns through the use of social networks - Google Patents

Abstract

A method and system for providing a social network for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns is disclosed. The method and system determine a level of a user based upon a weighting of one or more criteria indicative of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns, and provide the user with one or more rewards in the social network based upon the level of the user and/or the rate of promotion of the user between levels.

Description

METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR DEVELOPING AND IDENTIFYING LEADERS FOR
CHARITABLE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CAMPAIGNS THROUGH THE USE OF
SOCIAL NETWORKS

FIELD

The present disclosure relates to a method and system for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns through the use of social networks.
BACKGROUND

With the advances in social networking and more particularly in social networking platforms, there is an ongoing and increasing effort to develop and implement effective and sustainable support systems for social justice causes. Current systems that are in existence would normally tend to encourage charitable donations by individuals who are members of a social network. This would allow the user to create a campaign, wherein the created campaign is associated with one or more charities and a financial goal, allowing the user to send an invitation to one or more members or non-members, allowing the one or more members or non-members to accept or decline the user's invitation.

While these social networking websites, for example, Kiva.com, generally satisfy the need for a universal service that allows individuals to connect together and rally around a charitable cause, they fall short in stickiness, raising up leaders and identifying potential youth change makers in society.

SUMMARY
The disclosure provides, in part, a method and system for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns through the use of social networks.

In one of its aspects, the disclosure provides a system for providing a social network for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns, the system comprising at least one processor and at least one memory, the memory having stored thereon a database for storing information respecting users and instructions for execution by the processor to provide the social network, the system configured to:

(a) determine a level of a user based upon a weighting of one or more criteria indicative of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns; and (b) provide the user with one or more rewards in the social network based upon the level of the user and/or the rate of advancement of the user between levels.

The system may be further configured to, in response to a request from a user having a predetermined minimum level, create a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network and associated with the user. The system may be further configured to, in response to a request from a user, facilitate a financial contribution from the user to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network. The financial contributions may comprise monetary donations or loans. The system may be further configured to, in response to a request from a user, subscribe the user to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network. The system may be further configured to provide a marketplace for the sale of virtual items. The system may be further configured to facilitate a financial contribution to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network, the contribution comprising at least a portion of the proceeds received by a user from the sale of virtual items on the marketplace. The system may be further configured to provide a survey to a user and receive a completed survey from the user. The system may be further configured to receive self-promotional information provided by a user. The system may be further configured to execute a social network analysis tool to assess a user. The system may be further configured to to execute Integrative Complexity (IC) pyschographic tools to assess a user The criteria indicative of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns may comprise the total financial contributions made by other users to charitable or social justice campaigns hosted on the social network and associated with

2 a user. The criteria may comprise the total number of other users that subscribe to charitable or social justice campaigns hosted on the social network and associated with a user. The criteria may comprise a completed survey respecting a user, the survey completed by and provided to the system by a user. The criteria may comprise a completed survey respecting a user, the survey completed by and provided to the system by another user. The criteria may comprise self promotional information provided to the system by a user. The criteria may comprise results obtained from the execution of social network analysis tools by the system to assess a user. The criteria may comprise results obtained from the execution of Integrative Complexity (IC) pyschographic tools to assess a user The rewards provided to the user may comprise permitting a user to create one or more charitable or social justice campaigns on the social network. The rewards may comprise displaying a user level of a user in association with the user's activities on the social network, the user level awarded by the system to the user based upon the level of the user. The rewards may comprise providing a user with an accreditation. The rewards may comprise providing a user with free access to the social network. The rewards may comprise providing a user with wares, services or opportunities. The rewards may comprise providing a user with virtual currency useable on the social network.
The rewards may comprise providing a user with virtual items useable on the social network.
The virtual item may comprise displaying a tag in association with the user's activities on the social network. The rewards may comprise permitting a user to sell virtual items on the social network. The rewards may comprise permitting a user to create virtual items on the social network. The rewards may comprise permitting a user to nominate other users as having leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns.
The rewards may comprise permitting a user to upload and host user content on the social network.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The subject matter which is regarded as the invention is particularly pointed out and distinctly claimed in the claims at the conclusion of the specification.
The foregoing

3 and other objects, features, and advantages of the invention are apparent from the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which:

FIGURE 1 is a diagram illustrating a system architecture of a system for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns through the use of social networks according to one embodiment.

FIGURE 2 is an exemplary graphical user interface for the purchase of credits through the system shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 3 is a flow chart illustrating a method of creating a new member account through the system shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 4 is a flow chart illustrating a method of managing a response of a person to an invitation to join a group or campaign of a user through the system shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 5 is a diagram illustrating a system architecture the portion of the system shown in Figure 1 responsible for regulating the access of a user to the system.
FIGURE 6 is a diagram illustrating an exemplary charitable campaign hosted by the system shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 7 is a flow chart illustrating a method of creating and managing a campaign hosted by the system shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 8 is a diagram illustrating an example of the webpage link interface for creation of a campaign hosted by the system through the system shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 9 is a flow chart illustrating a method of creating and managing a group hosted by the system shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 10 is a flow chart illustrating the operation of a tagging module of the system shown in Figure 1.

4 FIGURE 11 is a diagram illustrating an example of the tagging interface utilized in the tagging module of the system shown in Figure 1.

FIGURES 12A and 16B are a flow charts illustrating the operation of various aspects of the system shown in Figure 1.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF EXEMPLARY EMBODIMENTS

The present invention may be understood more readily by reference to the following detailed description of exemplary embodiments of the invention taken in connection with the accompanying drawing figures, which form a part of this disclosure.
It is to be understood that this invention is not limited to the specific devices, methods, conditions or parameters described and/or shown herein, and that the terminology used herein is for the purpose of describing particular embodiments by way of example only and is not intended to be limiting of the claimed invention. Also, as used in the specification including the appended claims, the singular forms "a," "an," and "the"
include the plural, and reference to a particular numerical value includes at least that particular value, unless the context clearly dictates otherwise. Ranges may be expressed herein as from "about" or "approximately" one particular value and/or to "about" or "approximately" another particular value. When such a range is expressed, another embodiment includes from the one particular value and/or to the other particular value. Similarly, when values are expressed as approximations, by use of the antecedent "about," it will be understood that the particular value forms another embodiment.

In one embodiment, systems and methods are provided that allow and motivate users to "play a part" in social justice campaigns since they can continuously track their own and other user levels (including, rank and/or title) through the internet and mobile devices and determine which potential campaign will offer them the highest points to move to the next level (including, rank and/or title) so that they can outpace their friends and other users. Additionally, these systems and methods provide a continuously scalable charity vehicle.

5 In one embodiment, systems and methods are provided that can make use of and be implemented with a mix of existing social networking processes and websites (such as Google, Ebay, Flicker and YouTube) that are already available.
Moreover, such system can bolt onto existing social justice social networking sites such as Kiva.com. Additionally, such system can also include hardware to communicate through one or more media, such as power line communication or power line carrier (PLC) or power line networking (PLN), optical fibers, RF, BPL, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and ADSL
lines without requiring any standardization in protocol or standards. Additionally, such system can also include hardware to communicate over a network, such as but not limited to a local area network (LAN), a personal area network (PAN), a campus area network (CAN), a metropolitan area network (MAN), a wide area network (WAN) or a combination of any of the above. These networks may include but are not limited to the Internet, a telephone line using a modem (POTS), Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular, optical, satellite, RF, Ethernet, magnetic induction, coax, RS-485, and/ or other like networks.

In one embodiment, a method is provided of encouraging individuals who are members or non-members of a social network to support a charitable or social justice campaign wherein the created campaign is associated with one or more charities or just causes and a financial goal allowing the users to send a free invitation to one or more members or non-members, allowing that one or more members or non-members to accept or reject the user's free invitation, wherein the one or more non-members create a member account in order to accept or decline the users invitation, allowing the one or more members the option to "level up", or move to the next level (including, rank and/or title), in recognition based on a weighting of one or more criteria. This method will also allow individuals to connect together and rally around a charitable cause, increase stickiness, raise up leaders as well as identify potential change makers in society. As such, this universal service not only provides users with a means for bringing individuals together to support and raise money for charitable causes, but helps to empower them and maximize their leadership potential.

In one embodiment, a method is provided of encouraging higher level members (including, rank and/or title) of a social network to either support, lead and/or co-lead a

6 charitable or just cause wherein the created campaign is associated with one or more charities or just cause and a list of objectives allowing the users to send an invitation to one or more members of a certain level (including, rank and/or title), allowing that one or more members to accept or reject the user's invitation, allowing the one or more members the option to participate in the campaign or just cause and donate or loan any amount of money to a charity by way of token purchase or to post comments.
Further leveling up (including, rank and/or title) will be determined based on calculating a weighting of one or more criteria associated with the new social justice cause, wherein the criteria are indicative of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns.

In one embodiment, a method is provided of encouraging individuals who are members of a social network to suggest a new charitable or social justice campaign wherein the newly created campaign is associated with one or more charities and a financial goal and, when approved, allowing the users to send an invitation to one or more members of a certain level (including, rank and/or title), allowing that one or more members to accept or reject the user's invitation, allowing the one or more members the option to participate in the campaign or just cause and donate any amount of money to a charity or just cause by way of token purchase, or to post comments about the user.
Leadership levels (including, rank and/or title) are determined based on weighting one or more criteria allowing that one or more members to accept or reject the user's invitation, allowing the one or more members reaching a predefined score the option to participate in the nomination and put forward their names on the website for members to review.

In one embodiment, a method is provided of selecting individuals who are at the highest level (including, rank and/or title) of a social network and provide them the authority to approve a new charitable or social justice campaign wherein the newly created campaign is associated with one or more social justice causes and a financial goal allowing the users to send an invitation to one or more members of a certain level (including, rank and/or title), allowing that one or more members to accept or reject the user's invitation, allowing the one or more members the option to participate in the

7 campaign and donate or loan any amount of money to a charity by way of token purchase, or to post comments about the user. Such leadership levels (including, rank and/or title) are determined based on weighting one or more criteria allowing that one or more members to accept or reject the user's invitation, allowing the one or more members reaching a certain score the option to participate in the nomination and put forward their names on the website for members to review.

In one embodiment, a method is provided of encouraging families and their children of a social network to become involved in a charitable or social justice campaign through a web application interactive game, wherein the campaign is associated with one or more social justice causes and a financial goal allowing the users to send an invitation to one or more members of a certain level (including, rank and/or title), allowing that one or more members to accept or reject the user's invitation, allowing the one or more members the option to participate in the game and donate any amount of money to a charity by way of token purchase. Levels (including, rank and/or title) are determined based on calculating one or more scores based on the game scores, allowing the one or more members within these families reaching certain score (including, level, rank and/or title) the option to participate in boot camps, online psychometric tests or other activities for assessing the leadership potential of the user for charitable and social justice campaigns, and/or submit nomination for promotion of other users and put forward their names on the website for other members to review.
Referring to Figure 1, a functional block diagram is provided illustrating the system architecture of one embodiment of a system 100 for collecting and storing information about individuals in a social network, encouraging participation by individuals who are members of a social network, and developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns. The system 100 generally comprises a graphic user interface 102, a universal module 104, a reward transfer module 106, a new member's module 108, a voting/leveling up module 110, a monetization module 112, a charity module 114, a child protection module 116, a content generation module 118 and a tagging module 120. The graphic user interface

8 102, through use of various subsystems and user inputs, controls the flow of content in a social network that communicates with the other modules of the system 100.

The system 100 includes a server that enables the collection and storage of information about individuals in a social network, encouraging participation by individuals who are members of a social network, and developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns.

The remote devices 150 to 158 that access the system 100 may each be located at remote sites. Remote devices 150 to 158 include, but are not limited to, a PLC, PC, workstation, laptop, handheld computer, pocket PC, PDA, pager, WAP device, non-WAP device, cell phone, palm device, printing device and/or the like. Included with each remote device 301-305 is a browser that is able to access a graphical user interface 102.

Third party computer systems and databases (not shown) can be accessed by the system 100 in order to access any needed information not found on the primary server. Data that is obtained from third party computer system and database can be stored on server and database in order to provide later access to the remote devices 150 to 158. It is also contemplated that for certain types of data, the remote devices 150 to 158 can access the third party computer systems and database directly using a network.

The system 100 comprises one or more servers, such as, for example, PCs, workstations, laptops, PDAs, palm devices and the like. Generally, in terms of hardware architecture, the server includes a processor, memory, and one or more input and/or output (I/O) devices (or peripherals) that are communicatively coupled via a local interface. The local interface can be, for example, one or more buses or other wired or wireless connections, as are known in the art. The local interface may have additional elements, which are omitted for simplicity, such as controllers, buffers (caches), drivers, repeaters, and/or receivers, to enable communications. Further, the local interface may include address, control, and/or data connections to enable appropriate communications among the aforementioned components.

9 The processor is a hardware device for executing software that can be stored in memory. The processor can be virtually any custom-made or commercially available processor, a central processing unit (CPU), a data signal processor (DSP) or an auxiliary processor among several processors associated with the server, or a semiconductor-based microprocessor (in the form of a microchip) or a macroprocessor.
Examples of suitable commercially available microprocessors include, but are not limited to, the following: an 80x86 or Pentium series microprocessor from Intel Corporation, U.S.A., a PowerPC microprocessor from IBM , U.S.A., a SparcTM
microprocessor from Sun Microsystems , Inc., a PA-RISCT"" series microprocessor from Hewlett-Packard Company, U.S.A., a 68xxx series microprocessor from Motorola Corporation , U.S.A. or a PhenomTM, AthlonTM, SempronTMor OpteronTM
microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices , U.S.A.

The memory can include any one or combination of volatile memory elements (e.g., random access memory (RAM), such as dynamic random access memory (DRAM), static random access memory (SRAM), etc.) and nonvolatile memory elements (e.g., ROM, erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM), electronically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM), programmable read only memory (PROM), tape, compact disc read only memory (CD-ROM), disk, diskette, cartridge, cassette or the like, etc.). Moreover, the memory may incorporate electronic, magnetic, optical, and/or other types of storage media. Note that the memory can have a distributed architecture, where various components are situated remote from one another, but can be accessed by the processor.

The software in memory may include one or more separate programs, each of which comprises an ordered listing of executable instructions for implementing logical functions. In an example, the memory includes a suitable operating system (O/S) and the system architecture of the system 100. As illustrated, the system architecture of the system 100 comprises numerous functional components including, but not limited to, a universal module 104, reward transfer module 106, new member's module 108, voting/leveling up module 110, monetization module 112, charity module 114, child protection module 116, content generation module 118 and tagging module 120.

A non-exhaustive list of examples of suitable commercially available operating system is as follows (a) a WindowsNista operating system available from Microsoft Corporation; (b) a Netware operating system available from Novell, Inc.; (c) a Macintosh/OS X operating system available from Apple Computer, Inc.; (e) an UNIX
operating system, which is available for purchase from many vendors, such as but not limited to the Hewlett-Packard Company, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and AT&T
Corporation; (d) a LINUX operating system, which is freeware that is readily available on the Internet; (e) a run time Vxworks operating system from WindRiver Systems, Inc.;
or (f) an appliance-based operating system, such as that implemented in handheld computers or personal data assistants (PDAs) (such as for example Symbian OS
available from Symbian, Inc., PalmOS available from Palm Computing, Inc., and Windows CE available from Microsoft Corporation).

The operating system essentially controls the execution of other computer programs, such as the system architecture of the system 100, and provides scheduling, input-output control, file and data management, memory management, and communication control and related services. However, it is contemplated that the system architecture of the system 100 is applicable on all other commercially available operating systems.

The system architecture of the system 100 may be a source program, executable program (object code), script, or any other entity comprising a set of instructions to be performed. When a source program, then the program is usually translated via a compiler, assembler, interpreter, or the like, which may or may not be included within the memory, so as to operate properly in connection with the O/S. Furthermore, the system architecture of the system 100 can be written as (a) an object oriented programming language, which has classes of data and methods, or (b) a procedure programming language, which has routines, subroutines, and/or functions, for example but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Pascal, BASIC, API calls, HTML, XHTML, XML, ASP
scripts, FORTRAN, COBOL, Perl, Java, ADA,.NET, and the like.

The I/O devices may include input devices, for example but not limited to, a mouse (not shown), keyboard (not shown), scanner (not shown), microphone (not shown), etc. Furthermore, the I/O devices may also include output devices, for example but not limited to, a printer (not shown), display (not shown), etc. Finally, the I/O
devices may further include devices that communicate both inputs and outputs, for instance but not limited to, a NIC or modulator/demodulator (not shown), a radio frequency (RF) or other transceiver (not shown), a telephonic interface (not shown), a bridge (not shown), a router (not shown), and/or the like.

If the server is a PC, workstation, intelligent device or the like, the software in the memory may further include a basic input output system (BIOS) (omitted for simplicity).
The BIOS is a set of essential software routines that initialize and test hardware at startup, start the O/S, and support the transfer of data among the hardware devices.
The BIOS is stored in some type of read-only memory, such as ROM, PROM, EPROM, EEPROM or the like, so that the BIOS can be executed when the server is activated.

When the server is in operation, the processor is configured to execute software instructions stored within the memory, to communicate data to and from the memory, and generally to control operations of the server pursuant to the software.
The system architecture of the system 100 and the O/S instructions are read, in whole or in part, by the processor, perhaps buffered within the processor, and then executed.

When the system architecture of the system 100, as is shown in Figure 1, is implemented in software it should be noted that the system architecture of the system 100 can be embodied in any computer-readable medium for use by or in connection with an instruction execution system, apparatus, or device, such as a computer-based system, processor-containing system, or other system that can fetch the instructions from the instruction execution system, apparatus, or device and execute the instructions.

In the context of this document, a "computer-readable medium" can be any means that can store, communicate, propagate, or transport the program for use by or in connection with the instruction execution system, apparatus, or device. The computer readable medium can be, for example but not limited to, an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system, apparatus, device, propagation medium, or other physical device or means that can contain or store a computer program for use by or in connection with a computer related system or method.

More specific examples (a non-exhaustive list) of the computer-readable medium would include the following: an electrical connection (electronic) having one or more wires, a portable computer diskette (magnetic or optical), a random access memory (RAM) (electronic), a read-only memory (ROM) (electronic), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM, EEPROM, or Flash memory) (electronic), an optical fiber (optical), and a portable compact disc memory (CDROM, CD RJW) (optical). Note that the computer-readable medium could even be paper or another suitable medium, upon which the program is printed or punched (as in paper tape, punched cards, etc.), as the program can be electronically captured, via for instance optical scanning of the paper or other medium, then compiled, interpreted or otherwise processed in a suitable manner if necessary, and then stored in a computer memory.

In an alternative embodiment, where the system architecture of the system 100 is implemented in hardware, the system architecture of the system 100 can be implemented with any one or a combination of the following technologies, which are each well known in the art: a discrete logic circuit(s) having logic gates for implementing logic functions upon data signals, an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) having appropriate combinational logic gates, a programmable gate array(s) (PGA), a field programmable gate array (FPGA), etc.

The software in memory may include one or more separate programs, each of which comprises an ordered listing of executable instructions for implementing logical functions. The software in the memory includes a suitable operating system (O/S) and a browser. As illustrated, the remote devices 150 to 158 each include components that are similar to components for server described with regard to Figure 1.

All new members have to register into the website through the new members module but the system 100 will incorporate a crawler that will allow friends and contents from their existing Facebook, Twitter, Myspace sites to be dragged over.
Children from 9-18 years of age will be protected through a child protection module 116 that will filter and alert web administrators if there are any criminal or pedophiliac activities.

In one embodiment, the system 100 incorporates a broad range of web applications and games suitable for Children and families and an API will be provided to developers so as to encourage game development. In order to motivate children to be enthusiastic about social justice and change, parents and other family members are allowed to transfer credits earned through the reward transfer module 106. In addition, the system 100 incorporates a metaspace or marketplace (virtual cities, virtual buildings, virtual islands, virtual rooms) within the web application that will allow tokens and goods to be traded across the different social network sites. One embodiment could include a marketplace where artist and other musicians can showcase their goods and monetize this through a module that will automatically calculate the part that will go to charity, and those that will be considered revenue for the company and also the part that gets returned to the artist or publisher.

The voting/level-up module 110 assesses and determines if the member has achieved the minimum points needed to unlock rewards and to level up (including, rank and/or title). This module 110 will rely on levels (including, rank and/or title) or calculation of aggregated points based on social network analysis, personality test, peer appraisal and ranking, as well as financial contributions, loans and tokens raised through the charity module 114. Apart from the charity module 114, other modules will also play a part in determining member points. For instance, through the use of social network analysis tools, user who participates in polls, campaigns and activities may have an increased level (including, rank and/or title).

In the event that the member decides to either purchase tokens or purchase or donate an item and donate the proceeds to charity, the monetization module 112 will automatically calculate the commission to the merchants as well as indicate the points that members will earn to level-up (including, rank and/or title) and unlock rewards. In addition, members who are actively tagging through the tagging module 120 or constantly adding new tags and inviting friends to be part of their "tag team"
will also be rewarded through bonus points through the use of social network analysis tools.

The universal module 102 is technically not a module, but rather intends to be a hybrid application that provides a little bit of everything for all the other modules. The universal module 104 is linked with the other social network sites, and converts currency exchange into tokens that can be used on all the web applications throughout the universe. For example, some social network sites may use only a specific currency and the center of the universe site may allow providing a conversion between center of the universe dollars and currency used. In addition, the universal module 102 will provide cross site advertising. The tokens can be used in various ways, including the possibility of exchanging this to the currency of choice on any other social network site in the universe. For example, these other social networking sites may each use their own specific form of virtual cash or tokens. The tokens may be convertible into other social networking sites through an agreed formula. Alternatively, these tokens may also act as universal virtual cash that can be used directly on any of those sites.

The tokens can also be used to purchase reward items directly on the universal module 104, including items that are exclusive items that can be used on other sites, but are exclusive in the sense that they cannot be purchased on the other sites themselves. Therefore the user can send these items to either themselves or to someone else on a different site by addressing the recipient by username or through a feature code that can be emailed to the user and/or then emailed to the intended final recipient.

Apart from token sale, the universal module 102 may also be financed through advertising or membership subscription fees. It will also allow users to use real money to purchase items on the universal module 102, particularly for those users who do not want to invest the time to earn the virtual cash or do not desire to purchase virtual cash or tokens. For example, referring to Figure 2, an exemplary graphical user interface 200 for purchasing credits is shown. This feature may also appeal to anyone who knows anybody else who enjoys any of the other universe sites. The user can also purchase limited only gifts; either real or virtual, for themselves or for someone else, it forms a cross-demographic draw. Moreover, since the intent of the universal module 102 is to appeal to literally every different possible demographic and interest, presumably everyone will know someone who is interested in one of the partners of this universal module 102. Instead of needing to visit multiple different sites or multiple different stores to find multiple different gifts, the website could facilitate the purchasing gifts for a myriad of different people all at the same place.

The tokens can alternatively be earned by engaging in activities on universal module 102. For example, tokens can be obtained by reading, obtaining information, or simply visiting some of these sites, for example. Other activities on the site can also be used for obtaining such rewards.

The user can also include personalized information about themselves, such as their interests, picture, age, or other types of information that might be found on MySpace or Facebook type web applications. In addition, however, each of the sites in universal module 102 will have its own format of a social network that is specific to the specific site.

According to these features, the universal module 102 may allow trading items and or selling items for different currency, and currency conversion. The virtual currency can also be stored in a virtual "bank account" or virtual wallet.

The universal module 102 may operate to link a real world item or product with a virtual copy of that item. Some of the products in this gallery or marketplace may be limited editions-that is, that limited numbers of the products that are produced, after which, the products can no longer be obtained from the manufacturer. Also, the universal module 102 may also accommodate the trade or sell their possessions through a "garage sale" option; be they virtual or real possessions in exchange for tokens or cash to support a just cause. Other web applications may also be added to the universe that do not include some or all of these features.

The new members module describes the method for collecting and storing information about individuals in a social network. This module will create a member account by verifying a user's identity and collecting user identity data from the user. The module 102 allows the user to send an invitation to one or more members or non-members.

The invitation may be one or more of the following: an invitation to join a user group or an invitation to create a member account. This module 102 also allows members or non-members to accept or decline the user's invitation, wherein the one or more non-members may create a member account order to accept or to decline the user's invitation. In addition, the module 102 allows one or more members to post comments.

Referring to Figure 3, a flowchart is illustrates a method 300 of creating a new member account through the new members module 108, according to one embodiment of the present disclosure. In block 302, the user enters his/her user identity data. In block 304, the system 100 checks to see if the user's identity data is valid.
For example, the system 100 checks the user's entry to verify that the syntax is correct and/or that there is no information missing from any required field. The user identity data may include the user's full name, email address, nickname, date of birth, home address, date of birth, home address, work address, high school, college, degree, place of employment, work history, maiden name, country or any information that the user history to identify himself. If the user identity data is not valid then the system 100 will keep looping back for a fixed number of times and then lock-out the account.
If the user identity data is valid then the system 100 checks to see if the user's email address already exist. If the email address exist, the method 300 loops back to the sign in screen and the user re-enters the user identity data. If the email does not exist, the user enters his/her credit card information. The system 100 then checks to see if the credit card information is valid. If the user's credit card is not valid, the system 100 loops back for a fixed number of times and then locks-out the account. If the user's credit card is valid the system 100 checks to see if the user name matches the name on the user's credit card. According to this embodiment, verifying a user's identity comprises a zero-value transaction on a credit card owned by the user. If a minor-seeks access to the system 100 the child's parent or guardian may be required to explicitly approve the minor's use of the system 100, and the system 100 conducts a zero value transaction on a credit card owned by a parent or guardian with the same last name as the minor. If the names do not match, the system 100 loops back and will lock out the account after a fixed number of tries. If the names match, the system 100 provides the user with an agreement outlining the terms of use. If the user declines to accept the terms, the system 100 sends the user a "thank you for your interest" message and exits.
However, if the user accepts the terms, the system 100 sends the user a validation email. After this validation email is received, the member is created and the user identity is stored in the repository. With a credit card, a user may deposit a specified amount of money into his/her prepayment account and use that money to post comments, provide micro finance and buy tokens.

The member account may comprise the user's level (including, rank and/or title), the charities a user has contributed or helped provide micro finance to and the account balance. The user may edit his/her user identity data after it is entered. A
user may enter the new user identity data and the system 100 will check to see if input is valid.
For example, the system 100 may check the user's entry to verify that the syntax is correct and/or that there is no information missing from any required field.
If the user identity data is valid, the method 300 advances to block 306 where the system updates and store the data in a repository. The method 300 then proceeds to block 308 where the system 100 displays the new user identity data. The method 300 then proceeds to block 310 where the user is allowed to further edit the data. If the user chooses to edit the data again, then the system 100 loops back to block 302.
However, if the user chooses not to further edit the information, the method 300 proceeds to block 312 and the method 300 is terminated.

Referring to Figure 4, a flow diagram is shown of a method 400 of permitting a user to invite members or non-members to join his/her user group through the new members module 108. An invitation may be sent by email or any other means of notification, such as mail, text message, fax or phone. In block 402, the user enters individual information for a person and the systems 100 checks to see if the person is a member. If the person is a member and "existing member invite message" may be displayed to send to the member. The message may be automatically input by the system 100 or manually input by the user. The system 100 also checks to see if the input is valid. If the input is valid, the system 100 sends an email invitation to the existing member and acknowledges that the invitation was sent. However, if the person is not a member, the "prospective member" invitation message may be displayed to send to the prospective member. The message may be automatically input by the system 100 or manually input by the user. The system checks to see if the input is valid.
If the input is valid, the system sends an email invitation to the prospective member and acknowledges that the invitation was sent. The invited members or non-members may accept the invitation into the user's group, reject the invitation, or not respond to the invitation. The member or non-members may have a predetermined time in which to accept the invitation to join the user group. For example, a member or non-member may have six months to respond. In addition, a member or non-member who fails to respond or rejects the invitation may change his/her mind any time within the first year.

After a certain period of time, for example, one year, an invitation may automatically be removed from the system. In order for the non-member to either accept or reject the invitation, he/she may be required to become a member by creating a member account. The system 100 determines whether the invitee is a member. If it is determined that the invitee is not a member, the method 400 proceeds to block where the system 100 executes method 300 described above. If the invitee is member, the method proceeds to block 406 where the system 100 the member enters whether he accepts or declines the user invitation.

If the member accepts the user's invitation, the method 400 proceeds to block 408 where the system 100 updates the records to show that the member accepted the user's invitation. The method 400 then proceeds to block 410 where the system notifies the user (inviting member) by email of the acceptance by the invitee.
The method 400 then proceeds to block 412 where the system 100 provides and acknowledgment of the accepted invitation to the invitee. The method 400 then proceeds to block 414 and its terminated.

If in block 406, the member declines the user's invitation, the method 400 proceeds to block 416 where the system 100 updates the records to show that the member declined the user's invitation. The method 400 then proceeds to block where the system 100 notifies the user (inviting member) by email of the decline by the invitee. The method 400 then proceeds to block 420 where the system 100 provides and acknowledgment of the accepted invitation to the invitee. The method 400 then proceeds to block 422 and its terminated. If the member declines to accept the user's invitation the system will update the records to show that the member declined the user's invitation, notify the user by email and acknowledge the declined invitation. The system may store invitation data which comprises a member's name, status of the member's invitation, date and the time the invitation was sent, the total number of invitations accepted, not responded or rejected, and if applicable, the date and time the invitation was accepted or rejected.

The system 100 may store invitation data which comprises a member's name, status of the member's invitation, date and the time the invitation was sent, the total number of invitations accepted, not responded or rejected, and if applicable, the date and time the invitation was accepted or rejected.

In one embodiment, the system 100 develops and manages social age-specific user networks for children between the ages of 9 and 18. Users may include any age-appropriate registered individual which interacts with system 100 to communicate with other age-appropriate registered users, to plan events, schedule events, view scheduled events, register for participation, receive news updates, play streaming music, play online games, share ideas and interests, and the like.

Referring to Figure 5, a system diagram 500 is shown of a communication system 502 comprising a personalized user interface 504 and a child predator secure management component 506. Various users 551 to 554 may attempt to access the system 100 through the communication system 502.

If a user attempts to access the system 100 and is unauthorized or is not affiliated with the system 100, then the communication system 502 transmits a message to the user notifying the user that access to the system 100 is not authorized. The communication system 500 aborts the network session and the process ends. If the user or affiliation is verified, then system utilities are invoked to retrieve the user's personalized user interface 504. Personalized information and data includes information all electronic links connected to the personalized user interface 504 previously selected and/or saved.

Once a registered user logs into the system 100, the system 100 implements algorithms and computational tools through the child predator component 506 to monitor the actions of each registered and active user. If the child predator component 506 detects improper, inappropriate or other conduct that falls within parameters defining a person with criminal, pedophiliac or other conduct characterized to be a risk to children using the system 100, the child predator component 506 identifies the suspicious user and transmits a warning, notification or other alert to the system administrators and/or appropriate personnel. The child predator secure management component 506 then advises the administrators and/or appropriate personnel of the conduct observed and prompts further investigation of the suspicious user. The investigation may constitute further electronic monitoring and/or a full investigation of the suspicious user.

If the identified suspicious user poses a risk, substantial or otherwise, as determined by the system administrators and/or appropriate personnel, the suspicious user is removed from having access to the system 100 and blocked from further attempts to become a registered user.

In another embodiment, the user interface 102 in conjunction with the communication system 502 may perform background checks on new users and periodically run background checks on current users. Users could be screened through a background checking service to determine if they are "safe" users. For example, the communication system 502 may interface with or obtain data from criminal records, employment or business data, credit checks, civil litigation checks, other memberships, etc.

The communication system 502 performs background checks on new users to determine if they are safe users using the child predator secure management component 506. The personalized user interface 504 interacts with the child predator secure management component 506 to monitor users' activity and detect behavior that is indicative of child predator conduct.

The system 100 and child predator secure management component 506 function together to keep ineligible users (too young or too old) from registering and using the system 100. As part of this function, the system 100 and/or the child predator secure management component 596 requires a unique user ID and/or password and/or additional personal identification information to register with system 100 and access the network. Personal identification information may include identifiers such as credit card information, social security information, and/or date of birth, etc. Personal identification may also include biometric devices such as retinal scanner, a fingerprint scanner, a magnetic card reader, a Radio Frequency Identification ("RFID") tag reader, or other biometric scanners known in the art or later developed.

The personalized user interface 504 enables user to manage their personal social activities within a social network. The interface 504 may be presented in relation to the type of device used to access and interact with the system 100. For example, if the connecting device is a kiosk, the interface may include large interface elements to enable user greater control through a touch-screen. However, if the connecting device is a cellular telephone or personal digital assistant, interface elements may be configured to enable larger amounts of data to be viewable from a small LCD
screen, or the interface may be divided between two or more specific interfaces.

The personalized user interface 504 may include a unique greeting to ensure user that he/she is viewing the proper personalized user interface 504.
Moreover, the personalized user interface 504 may include an electronically linked text or graphic to identify and connect to a specific social network sphere The system 100 can also make use of a collaborative filtering algorithm (see, e.g., Daniel Lemire, Anan Maclachlam, Slope One Predictors for Online Rating-Based Collaborative Filtering, In SIAM Data Mining (SDM '05), Newport Beach, California, April 21-23, 2005) to transmit to the personalized user interface 504 spheres (e.g., music, TV
shows, movies/film, romance/dating/relationships, sports, online games, art, photography, fashion, computers, technology, video creation, fitness, travel, meeting other boys/girls, weather updates, directions to events, sale of complementary products, ideas, groups, interests, chat rooms, lists, products, services, etc.) for the user to investigate and integrate into his/her personalized user interface 504, based on the user's prior input and activity within the system 100. Other algorithms or technology may be utilized to achieve matching scenarios for users based on interests and prior online conduct accessible to system 100.

The system 100 may allow authorized third party retailers, organizations, educational institutions, etc., full or limited access to the system 100 database, or a component thereof, to directly access users to allow a 1 : 1 marketing ratio between merchant and user using the collaborative filtering algorithm.

Because the social network groups individuals into spheres of like, interests, ideas, gender, age, etc., personalized user interface 504 but may further include additional information and electronic links to enable businesses to closely target their prime demographic by selecting specific networks to place advertising.

The system 100 may enable users to schedule events with other users or authorized third parties using an automated calendaring component. For example, a university may schedule an in person or virtual campus tour with users. When such an event is scheduled and the user is invited to such event, it will appear as a pending invitation within the personalized user interface 504.

The charity module 114 may be used to implement a method for encouraging charitable donations or micro loans through a social network where a user may raise money and awareness for a favorite charity or non-profit organization by organizing groups and campaigns and linking the two together. The more money and the more members or non-members who support the user's charitable campaign, the higher a user's level (including, rank and/or title) may be. For example, the method may be used to organize groups of members so that they can achieve social goals, such as raising money or loans for a charity, organizing volunteers, orchestrating alumni activities, or keeping in touch. According to one embodiment, the concept of a charity donation may be merged with a Blog entry and associated with a charitable campaign, acting as a running commentary on the concept or progress of the charitable campaign through video streaming or reality television. The more a user utilizes the system, the higher the user's level (including, rank and/or title) will be. The user's level (including, rank and/or title) acts as an indicator of the use's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns. Persons who are altruistic and who encourage altruism, i.e.
charitable donations or micro financing, are trustworthy and tend to have greater leadership potential for such charitable and social justice campaigns.

Referring to Figure 7, a flow diagram is shown of a method 700 of allowing a user to create and managing a campaign. In block 702, the user may create a member account by supplying user identity data to the system 100, which is then verified by the system 100. In block 704, the user may create a campaign and associate the created campaign with one or more charities or social justice events and a goal, such as a financial goal or a participation goal. A campaign is a specific charitable cause (or individual) that the user is passionate about and seeks to support. For example, a user may create a campaign to raise money to support the Girls Scouts, AIDS
research, Cancer research, victims of 9/11, or any other charitable or social justice cause. The campaign may be created by describing the campaign and by selecting a name for the campaign and a date to reach the financial goal for the charitable campaign.
For example, a user may create a campaign to save Burma and may choose a financial goal in any amount, for example, $3,000.00, donating all proceeds from the campaign to United Way of America. Alternatively, the user may be able to access an individual's "wish list" and decide to send the proceeds to that individual, for example, Sam Broke who is in need of a new drum set for his band. The user may select the name "Sam Broke" set a goal deadline of Dec. 15, 2008 and describe the campaign by providing the history of Sam Broke and his band. The user may upload one or more images or video to associate with the campaign. In addition, the user may associate the campaign with a link to an external web page. For example, a link may be provided to a web page that lists facts about drum sets. The user may create one or more campaigns, which all may be active simultaneously at any given time. Referring to Figure 6, an example is shown of a webpage 600 containing a charitable campaign that is hosted by the system 100.
Referring again to Figure 7, in block 706, the user may send an invitation to one or more members or non-members upon the approval of the campaign by either peers or a select group of individuals. The one or more members may accept or decline a users invitation, where the one or more non-members may create a member account in order to accept or decline the users invitation. In block 708, the one or more members have the option to donate or provide micro loans of any amount of money to a charity.
The user may then invite one or more members or non-members to support the campaign by donating time, resources and money to the one or more charities or social justice activities to help reach financial or other targets. The members or non-members may be invited through, for example, email or any other communication means.
For example, invitations may be sent to all the members of a users group to support the users campaign. According to an embodiment, the invited one or more members or non-members may invite one or more additional members or non-members to donate money or time and resources to the campaign. The one or more invited non-members may be required to create a member account in order to participate, according to an embodiment.

The one or more invited members or non-members may support the campaign by purchasing tokens or supporting the one or more charities or just cause to help reach their different objectives. According to one embodiment, the one or more invited members or non-members may make posts. For example, the one or more members or non-members may post a comment about how great they think the campaign is.
According to one embodiment, the one or more invited members or non-members may continue to support the one or more charities and just causes, even after the financial and other objectives are reached.

If the targets are specifically financial ones, the value of each donation or microloans by the one or more members or non-members is deducted from the financial goal and displayed. In addition, the running total may be displayed. For example, the user or any other member or non-member may want to see the details of all the donations made to the campaign to date. One view may show the donation by each member or non-member listed, for example, in date order or order of value, with the highest donation appearing first.

In block 710, if the goals are strictly financial in nature, one or more user levels (including, rank and/or title) may be calculated based on (1) a total volume of the members or non-members who support the campaign by donating or loaning money to the one or more charities or just causes, and/or (2) a total monetary value of the money donated by the one or more members or non-members. The user's level (including, rank and/or title) represents an indication of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns. For example, the more money that the members or non-members donate or provide loans through the campaign to the one or more charities or just causes, the higher the user's level (including, rank and/or title) may be. Similarly, the higher the number of members or non-members who donate or provide loans through the campaign to the one or more charities or just causes, the higher the user's level (including, rank and/or title) might be. In other words, the user's reputation is more reliable if the user can encourage social good by procuring a large number of charitable donations or microloans.

The user may enter a campaign name, description, a link to an external web page, a deadline, a financial goal, a charity, and an image file. Referring to Figure 8, a form 800 is shown for entering information by the user to create a campaign.

The method of the present disclosure may allow a user to post a message to a message board in the form of, for example, a blog, and encourage charitable donations by allowing members to donate money or provide microloans to charity when posting to the message board. A blog refers to a website where users post comments on a particular subject, and the comments are displayed in reverse chronological order, according to the date on which the comment was posted. The method may allow a user to link the posted message to one or more of the user's campaigns, according to one embodiment.

The user of the social network may form a group, where the group is associated with a message board, such as a blog. The user may donate or provide microloans of any amount of money to one or more charities to post a message to the group message board. According to one embodiment, a user may identify any topic of his/her choosing, or may choose a topic from a predetermined list of topics. The user may invite members or non-members to join the group or post a reply to the message. One or more members or non-members may donate or micro loans of any amount of money to one or more charities or just cause. According to an embodiment, the user or the one or more members or non-members may make an anonymous donation to the one or more charities if they do not want to be identified.

One or more user levels (including, rank and/or title) may be calculated based at least on a total monetary value associated with the posted message and the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns. For example, the higher the monetary value, the higher the user's level (including, rank and/or title) may be. A
higher user level (including, rank and/or title) could also be obtained if the user has encouraged members or non-members to do a good act and support a just cause.
Indeed, the more support the user elicits, the higher the user's level (including, rank and/or title) would be. According to an embodiment, the value and number of users who support the use's campaigns may be displayed together with the total value of all donations or loans.

For example, a member may identify a topic relating to "solar panels" and post a message requesting whether anyone knows a solar panel supplier in Oyster Bay, N.Y.
The posted message may include a hyperlink to one or more of the user's campaigns.
One or more other members or non-members may then reply to the posted message.
The posted replies also may include a hyperlink to one or more of the members' or non-members' campaigns. According to an embodiment, the member may require members or non-members to participate in his campaign in order to reply to the member's posted message.

Referring to Figure 9, a method 900 of allowing a user to create and manage a group is shown. In block 902, a campaign group may be created and associated with one or more charities through a campaign to allow connections of people to stay in touch and connected to each other to collaborate toward a just cause, for example, raising money for a charity, a club, or a workgroup within a company. An authorized user may create a campaign group and associate the group with one or more charities through one or more campaigns. The authorized user may create this campaign group by entering a group name and a mission for the campaign group. In addition, the user has the option of setting a group's privacy by designating the campaign group public or private. If the campaign group is designated as public, anyone may join, even non-members. If the campaign group is designated as private, only members may join. The user also may choose whether to allow only invited members to join or whether to allow any other members to join. The user may also designate whether a joining member or non-member may need approval to join. For example, before a member or non-member joins the campaign group they may need the user's approval, majority approval, or unanimous approval from the other members of the group, or may need to be sponsored by a predetermined number of members. The user has the option to edit the group name, mission, privacy, joining features, inclusion features and group campaign at any time. The user who creates the campaign group may become the moderator of the campaign group or another group member may be chosen or elected. In addition, the authorized user may resign as moderator of the campaign group at any time, reassign a new moderator, or delete the campaign group.

Once the campaign group is created and approved, in block 904, a user may invite one or more members or non-members to join the created campaign group and to donate or provide microloans to the one or more charities through the one or more campaigns. For example, the authorized user may send an invitation to join the campaign group to any member of the public by providing the recipient's email address.
In addition, if the authorized user has created other campaign groups, the authorized user may invite the members of those campaign groups to join the newly created campaign group. Alternatively, an authorized user may invite one or more members who are saved in an address book or all members who are located by an automatic search of the member database. The description of an automatic search is further set forth below. In block 906, the one or more invited members or non-members may join the campaign group and donate money to the one or more charities through the one or more campaigns.

In block 908, similar to the concept of the user level (including, rank and/or title) described above, a level or "group score" may be assigned to the group as a whole.
That value will be referred to herein as the "group level." A group level may be calculated based at least on the number of invited members or non-members of the social network who join the group and, if financial goal is the target, a total monetary value of the money donated or loaned to the one or more charities through the one or more campaigns by all of the members of the group. The group level may be used as an indicator of the impact that the group is making collectively, for example, in connection supporting this just cause through a campaign.

In addition, a level or "group score" may be assigned to the charities or other companies or entities who participate in the social networking site. This level may be referred to as an "entity level value." For example, a charity which participates in a campaign to raise money will receive an entity level which may correspond to the amount and/or number of donations it encourages. Entities which keep users informed and up-to-date about the status of a campaign, for example, may be rewarded by having their entity level increased according to the level and/or frequency of such updates. If users can view the success of the campaigns, they may be more likely to donate money or provide microloans.

Charities or other entities which participate in the system 100 site also may sponsor polls or post message boards which solicit commentary from the users of the system 100. The polls may survey members on any topic of interest. The message boards allow users to use words to convey a message. The entries may be posted on the virtual message board for all users of the social network to see. For example, a charity or other entity may query users as to how they perceive the work being done by the charity. When users of the social network participate in the polls and/or post comments on the message boards, and donate money or provide microloans to one or more charities, the entity level may increase because charitable contributions have been encouraged by the charity.

Peer ranking can be achieved using tools such as social network analysis.
Social network analysis software (SNA software) facilitates quantitative or qualitative analysis of social networks, by describing features of a network, either through numerical or visual representation. Networks can consist of anything from families, project teams, classrooms, soccer teams, legislatures, nation-states, disease vectors, membership on networking websites like Twitter or Facebook, or even the Internet. Network features can be at the level of individual nodes, dyads, triads, ties and/or edges, or the entire network. For example, node-level features can include network phenomena such as betweeness and centrality, or individual attributes such as age, sex, or income. SNA
software generates these features from raw network data formatted in an edgelist, adjacency list, or adjacency matrix (also called sociomatnx), often combined with (individual/node-level) attribute data (See Robert A. Hanneman and Mark Riddle, "Introduction to social network methods", available online, http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/-hanneman/nettext/). Though the vast majority of network analysis software uses a plain text ASCII data format, some software packages contain the capability to utilize relational databases to import and/or store network features.

Some SNA software can perform predictive analysis. This includes using network phenomena such as a tie to predict individual level outcomes (often called peer influence or contagion modeling), using individual-level phenomena to predict network outcomes such as the formation of a tie/edge (often called homophily models) or particular type of triad, or using network phenomena to predict other network phenomena, such as using a triad formation at time 0 to predict tie formation at time 1.

Network analysis software generally consists of either packages based on graphical user interfaces (GUls), or packages built for scripting/programming languages. GUI packages are easier to learn, while scripting tools are more powerful and extensible. Widely used and well-documented GUI packages include UCINet for statistical analysis of networks with easy-to-use visualization capabilities, Pajek which is free and for which exists extensive documentation, GUESS, ORA, and Cytoscape, the most feature-rich and extensible of these GUI-based software packages. Private GUI
packages directed at business customers include: Orgnet, which provides training on the use of its software, and KXEN, Other SNA platforms, such as Idiro SNA Plus are also possible software platforms.

One of the features of the social network analysis software is to allow a user easily to find other users who have similar interests, goals, skills, etc. For example, if a user wants to find all members who are interested in a specific just cause or charity, he may search the social network manually by entering in, for example, "green energy"
Such a search would locate all the members who have listed "green energy" as an item on their wish list. However, since new members are always joining the social network, it would be tedious to perform this search manually each time a user wanted to locate new members with shared interests. According to one embodiment, an automatic search may be performed. A user lists one or more user identity data search terms. The user identity data search terms relate to user identity data or other criteria, such as skills, interests, age, race, gender, location, employment, favorite charities, group memberships, languages spoken, etc. The user identity data search terms may be automatically compared to the user identity data of one or more members. The user may save the user identity data search terms and the system will automatically run the search during predetermined time intervals, such as every three hours, to locate any new members who have joined the social network and who match the user identity data search terms. If one or more user identity data search terms match the user identity data of one or more members, those one or more members may be placed in a list, such as, for example, a "recommended" list, which may be a data file associated with the user, a database or any other means to store information relating to the user. The user's "recommended" list may automatically be updated to add the one or more members. This feature enables a user to save time by automatically running searches to keep track of members who meet a user's specified criteria. For example, if a user wants to find all members who are interested in green energy, the system 100 will find all newly joining members who have listed green energy as one of their interests and automatically add the new members to the user's "recommended" list. This provides the user with a comprehensive list if the user needs to invite all the members to participate in a campaign, join a group, or take a poll.

According to one embodiment, a user may export his or her calculated user level (including, rank and/or title) to any email, web page, advertisement, message board, blog, or any other electronic medium, simply by exporting computer code containing the user's level information (including, rank and/or title) into such medium. This exported data may be referred to as a "Tag," which allows the user to inform others outside the social network about their reliable and trustworthy reputation.

The tagging module 120 refers to a method by which customized tags can be created by a user in an online system environment and distributed to facilitate social networking. The tags represent new communities of interest with users of the online system environment. By utilizing a computer or graphic user interface (GUI) that enables an authorized user to create and customize tags, the user can create a specific tag according to instructions from the specific user and make the specific tag available for use by the specific user. The steps of allowing the user to create the customized tags may include defining the tag parameters, e.g. a name, a graphic icon, and a category, etc.

Once a person registers using the new member's module 108, he can fill out his profile and invite all of his friends to join his tag Team or community. The user can continue to add people to his team, see who's in other people's tag teams, and check out other people's profiles by clicking on their names.

Tags represents the interest of the user. For example, if the user is a great host, she can select a hospitality tag, or if a dancer, painter or a writer, select the Arts tag. A
user can give her friends tags (like "Best Friend," etc.) to let them know what she thinks about them. If the user wants to nudge his friends to give him tags, he can ask them by going to his tag Team page and clicking the hand icon next to each person on his team to ask for tags.

Tags can be created by the user via the provider's user interface by defining various tag parameters, e.g. name, graphic icon, etc. In one embodiment, a system and method are provided for creating customized tags that represents personal characteristics and preferences, by users of a social network website, to facilitate online social networking, as well as advertisement method in the online system environment by using sponsored tags.

Tags can be embeddable in that they could be inserted in a website GUI for display by a user. Also, tags may have embedded contents, e.g. a photo, a song, a location of a profile page, a shout out, an expression of feelings, tags, or presents. Also, tags can sponsored in the system environment by celebrities, the creators of tags, and sponsors.

An user of an online social network can Log on, and choose one of the options available from the online system provider's GUI. In one embodiment, the user can request to create tags, or request to display predefined tags, or request other tasks.
After the user opts to create customized tags, a provider GUI enables the user to create customized tags by defining the tag parameters, e.g. a name, a graphic icon, a category, etc. Once the customized tags are defined, the tag data can be stored and associated with the creator (user) for future use. If the user instead chooses to display the list of tag library, the provider GUI shows predefined tags for the user to browse.
The user can select tags among the predefined tags displayed, or opt to create customized tags if he does not want to use the predefined tags. If the user has chosen to request other tasks from the provider GUI, he can perform the tasks and end the session.

Referring to Figure 10, a method 1000 of creating and managing tags is shown.
The method 1000 starts at block 1002. In block 1004, a user of the system 100 logs into the system 100. In block 1006 the use may choose one of the options available from the online system provider's GUI. In block 1008, the user can request to create embedded tags. In block 1010, the user can request to display predefined embedded tags. In block 1012, the user can request other tasks and then perform such tasks in block 1018.

In block 1014, the user opts to create customized embedded tags. The method 1000 then proceeds to block 1020 where a provider GUI enables the user to create customized embedded tags by defining the tag parameters, e.g. a name, a graphic icon, embedded content, a category, etc. The method 1000 then proceeds to block 1022 where the tag data can be associated with the user for future use. The method then proceeds to step 1026 where the user can select embedded tag options, e.g.
recipient list, buddy list, external distribution, a category, etc.

Alternatively, instead of creating an embedded tag, in block 1016 the user chooses to display the list of embedded tag library and the provider GUI shows predefined embedded tags for the user to browse. The method 1000 then proceeds to block 1024 where the user can select embedded tags among the predefined embedded tags displayed, or opt to create customized embedded tags if he does not want to use the predefined tags. If the user select predefined embedded tags, the method proceeds to step 1026 where the user can select the embedded tag options, e.g.
recipient list, buddy list, external distribution, a category, etc.

A GUI provided to a user that enables the user to work with tags, invite friends, create teams, and accomplish other system 100 tasks as will be appreciated by those skilled in the art. The GUI includes a statistics window that allows the user to review and edit personal statistics. The GUI may also include the user's photos. The tag represents personal characteristics and preferences. The GUI further includes a tag team window, a 'friends' management window, and a URL management window. The personal profile page GUI may be customized to show personal style, and also traded or sponsored in the system environment. Referring to Figure 11, an example of a tag GUI 1100 is shown.

The content generation module 118 deals with user generated content, particularly those that are fragmented across many websites. For example, ratings and reviews for hotels are available from Yahoo!TM Travel, Frommer'sTM, ExpediaTM, etc. In the restaurant area, ratings and reviews are available from Yahoo!T"" Local, YelpTM, etc.
In the online shopping area, product ratings and reviews are available from Yahoo!TM
Shopping, EpinionsT"", CNETTM, etc.

A method to access trusted user generated content (UGC) is provided in this module 118. User registration information containing one or more identities is obtained.
The identities correspond to different internet social networks that are facilitated by social network service providers, where each service is associated with an internet social network site. The social relationships in each social network are collected using the provided user identities and user extended social networks are created for each user by joining the social relationships collected. Joining social relationships includes identifying the multiple identities of a single user in the different social networks and then merging the user's social networks into one extended social network that includes all the relationships scattered throughout the different social networks.

Then, UGC is collected from the plurality of social network sites and the collected UGC is correlated with the extended social networks, including identifying the owners of content according to the extended social networks of registered users. The correlated UGC is filtered according to the user configuration of a user making a request, and then the results are presented to the requesting user. The results can be shown to the user in a variety of ways, such as on a display using a web browser, email, instant messaging, etc. The display can be, for example, part of a computer system or a mobile phone.

A search function is provided to enable users to obtain information on demand.
Alternatively, users can subscribe to feeds of information according to a configuration regarding the user's extended social network.

In another embodiment, the system 100 may access trusted UGC. The system 100 includes a plurality of social network sites, and a registration server to receive user registration information. The registration information including one or more identities for each user in a plurality of social network sites. The system 100 also includes a crawler to collect UGC and social relationships corresponding to the identities for each user from the plurality of social network sites, and a user metadata database that contains user extended social networks. The user extended social networks are created by joining the collected social relationships, and the collected UGC is correlated with the extended social networks.

The system 100 further includes a user content database including the UGC
obtained by the crawler, a search engine to filter the correlated UGC, and a display to provide the content to the requesting user.

Extended Social Network Server allows users to register their identities from the different social networks and merge the different social groups into one large extended social network. Users create content in the different social network sites.
Ratings, reviews, and wish lists are some of the popular ways of creating user generated content. For example, in the areas of photo sharing and blogs, FlickrTM and XangaTM
both have built-in social networks. To share FlickrTM photos or XangaTM blogs, potential viewers need to be registered users and need to either be flagged as friends of the author or have subscribed to the author's content on each site. This procedure may be repeated on every closed content system. In contrast, in this embodiment, the social relationship only needs to be registered once. In the example mentioned above, each user registers his FlickTM and XangaTM identities and the sharing happens automatically.
Furthermore, a user's friends are not required to register on Flickr or Xanga in order to subscribe to updates of the user's content. Once the relationship is established once, all the content generated by a user in any social network site is made available to her friends, or in other words, all those that are linked to the user via any social network.
Typically users access content via browser running on a computer display. In other embodiments, content may be available via a mobile phone, laptop, handheld computer, etc., via browser, email, blogs, feeds, etc.

User generated content that is currently fragmented across disparate websites can now be access through this module 118. User can search or browse the content generated by his friends, friends of friends, etc., or any subset thereof. In this example, user can access content from user friends, such as AmazonTM wish list, YelpTM
review, Wall Street JoumalT'" (WSJ) review, Yahoo!TM Shopping review, etc., or content from friends-of-friends such as the one created by user, San Jose Mercury News (SJMN) review, or Yahoo!TM Travel trip plan.

Each user registers her identities in one or more social sites. Users can subscribe to feeds of content according the users interests, or do ad-hoc searches on the user generated content across all or any subset of the user generated content hosting websites known to the system 100. Ongoing feeds of information are saved in the system 100 as Access Rules, which define parameters related to authoring, category, keywords, site, origin, etc.

Privacy is an important consideration for many users. The system 100 allows the user (owner of user generated content) to specify what and to whom to share.
In one embodiment, sharing is specified by the following parameters: content, sharing target, and identification option. The content component specifies a subset of the user's content and can include all content, content in a given category (e.g. all my restaurant reviews), or content in one site (e.g. all my Yelp reviews). Sharing target specifies the friends to share the given content with, e.g. "all friends of friends", "all friends", or "Alice and Bob". Identification option specifies whether to display the content owners identity to the sharing target. Suppose Bob is sharing his yelp.com reviews with Alice.
If Bob chooses not to share his identity, then Alice will see Bob's yelp.com reviews marked as reviews of a friend. Also, if Alice searches for content authored by Bob, then no results will be returned. If Bob chooses to share his identity, then Alice will see Bob's identity associated with Bob's reviews.

These limitations on sharing are stored as Share Rules. Additionally, rules can enable sharing within a category of content generated by the user, such as "make public all my book purchases," or impose specific restrictions on what can not be shared, such as "do not share my purchase on a book related to cancer in Yahoo! Shopping."

Search options can be entered via pull-down menus, input fields, buttons, etc.
In other embodiments, search options can be provided in different formats, according to the requirements of the developer. In other embodiments, search windows for on-demand searching have different interfaces than feed subscription windows. A
user requesting 'monthly' in frequency field will cause the Extended Social Network Server to create a feed subscription for the user. On the other hand, a user selecting 'Search now' will cause the Server to perform an instant search according to the given parameters.

It should be noted that this system 100 can be implemented as a component of an existing social network (e.g. Yahoo! Mash, Facebook, etc), or as a light weight social network. If the system 100 is part of an existing social network, then the system 100 is already aware of the social network structure. The user would register his identities on external content sites in registration server and specify what type of content from the user to be shared with what subset of friends (e.g. share all my content with all my immediate friends; allow only Alice and Bob to subscribe to my content; share only my content on Yelp to friends of friends and do not show my identity with the content), etc.
If the system is not part of an existing social network, then a new social network is created and users would also register their friends, which could for example be identified by their email addresses.

Registration server generates user metadata that incorporates the different user identities in the plurality of social networks. Crawler accesses the different social networks and finds the friends of the registered user. The information is joined together to form an extended social network, as described below with respect to Crawler also accesses content sites searching for content. For each piece of content retrieved, the site specific author identity (e.g. yelp id of the author of a yelp review) is extracted and associated with the content. Crawler also schedules itself to crawl regularly in order to detect new content. Some content sites have Application Program Interfaces (API) that can be used to retrieve content rather than running a brute force web crawl on the site.
The content found by crawler is stored in User Content database.

A Search/Browse Engine provides a user interface to search or browse the UCC
collected by the crawler. In a first mode, Search/Browse Engine performs general searches of UGC that do not make use of the user's social network.
Search/Browse Engine works with the full collection of UGC collected by the crawler. The user may perform keyword queries (e.g. "Geothermal sites", "solar energy"), optionally include parameters such as categories (e.g. energy), content creation date (e.g. 6 month old or less), site sources (e.g. only Y Travel and Yelp), etc., as previously described. If the UGC is shared by a friend, the friend's identity is shown next to the content.

In a second mode, Search/Browse Engine only searches UGC produced by the user's social network. The user has the option of being more or less restrictive (e.g.
friends of friends, or only specific immediate friends). It should be noted that in this mode, the system would only show content that has been shared by the content-producing friend with this user.

Subscription Server enables users to subscribe to content and receive feeds containing UGC of interest. Interest can be indicated by a keyword query (e.g.
"San Francisco hotels", "apple iphone"), a category (e.g. hotels), a social network range (e.g.
all content, all friends, specific friends), and site or sites. After the crawler completes a regularly scheduled crawl, the subscription server executes all the user interest requests. If a given request produces new content results, the new results are saved in a database, or transmitted to the subscriber.

Subscription Server can also generate recommendations using collaboration techniques. Traditional collaborative filtering techniques work by finding users among a large set of users deemed to be "similar" to the requester, and then looking at what the "similar" users prefer to make recommendations to the requester. For example, Yahoo!
Music compares music preferences and ratings from millions of users in order to compute recommendations. These millions of users are anonymous, and hence untrustworthy. A person is often more interested in recommendations from known people rather than recommendations from strangers. Subscription Server is able to efficiently narrow down the set of users to be used for recommendation computation to those users relatively close to the requester in real life (e.g. friends, or friends of friends). Hence, recommendations may be more relevant, as well as more authoritative.
For example, it is more relevant if friends of a requester suggest that the requester might like Uganda, than if millions of anonymous Yahoo! users suggest that the requester might like Uganda.

Subscription server can also compute trend information by analyzing user activities. For example, a user may be alerted than two of her friends recently wrote reviews about Uganda, or that Calcutta is the highest rated village by the user's friends.

The Extended Social Network Server can also generate behavioral data. The components previously described rely on user generated content that is publicly available on the Internet. If Server is operated by the same entity as a content website, then Server can leverage non-publicly available behavioral information logged by the content website servers. If Server has access to product reviews in a shopping site, then Server can access user behavior data in shopping site, such as product purchase or page-viewing history. Server utilizes this information and makes the information available to users in the social network of a given user. For example, the system 100 could show trends (three friends recently looked at the Apple iPhone product page), and the system would allow users to do searches related to purchasing in the shopping site (find friends who have purchased the Apple iPhone). This is also available for non-user generated content sites. For example, if users allow sharing their news story browsing history, then the system can recommend news stories to other users based on user friends' browsing histories.

Three social networks, Facebook , Yahoo! Groups, and Google Groups have users and content to be captured by the Extended Social Network Server. Users have one or more identities in the social networks. For description purposes only, user ids have been formed by adding a name to a number. Those ids with the same name but different number attached to the name represent different identities the same user in different social networks. For example, Bob has identities Bob in Facebook , Bob in Yahoo! Groups, and no identity in Google Groups.

Below each user, those users that have been registered as friends are placed.
For example, Bob has friends Al, Carl, and Dan, all of them in the same social network.
Additionally, some users have created content that is associated with their id, such as Bob's UGC. In this case, users Bob, Al, Carl and Pam have registered into the extended social network. Pam has two ids, Pam1 and Pam2 but wishes to keep her identity Pam2 private so Pam only registers Pam 1.

A crawler collects the different relationships for the registered users and joins them together under the unique identity, as seen in user metadata table. For example, Bob has registered identity Bob from Facebook (noted as F.Bob ) giving his password ("whocares"), and Bob from Yahoo! Groups. Al has registered identities Al from Yahoo!
and Al from Google Groups.

During the join process, the system 100 uses the information related to multiplicity of identities from users, and their social networks, to create an extended social network. Here, Bob's network includes Carl (that has registered and listed all his identities, so there is no need to list all of Carl's identities), F.Hugh (found in Facebook, but since Hugh has not registered, the identity from Facebook is used), Al (registered), and Y.Dan (unregistered user found in Yahoo). Pam's network consists only of Al, which was found in Google. Pam is not in the system 100; therefore Pam has privacy with respect to that identity. F.Hugh was found because he is a friend of Bob in Facebook, resulting in F.Hugh being added to the system 100, and F.Hugh's network in Facebook is also recorded (Carl and Lee). It should be noted, that this example assumes that the system 100 is not symmetrical, that is, a friend of a user does not imply that friend has user as a friend. Or simply put, just because Hugh is a friend of Bob does not mean that Bob is a friend of Hugh. In another embodiment, the relationships are symmetrical, and in our example it would mean that Bob would be added as one of the friends of Hugh because Hugh is a friend of Bob.

In another embodiment, users can identify their friends when registering if the crawler does not have access to existing relationships in the social networks.
In another embodiment, the user provides the password used for each of the different identities to enable the crawler to access their information in the social network.

In addition to the User Metadata, the user also collects UGC via Crawler, as described previously. The content is correlated to the owners according to the identities and relationships available in user metadata.

In operation, the user registration is received, such as for example the process previously described with respect. The registration information includes one or more identities for each user in the different social networks. The social networks are hosted by social network sites.

A crawler collects the social relationships corresponding to the identities registered in operation by accessing the social network sites. The collected information is processed in operation and extended social networks are created.

The crawler collects UGC in operation by accessing the social network sites.
As previously mentioned, the crawler may use an API or a brute force scan to gather the UGC. The user information and the UGC collected is correlated, attributing authorship to registered users independently of where the content was created, and giving access to other users, independently of where their social relationship was established.

Users define what kind of UGC they wish to access and the UGC is filtered according to their definitions in operation. Access can be made on demand, or feeds of information can be delivered to requesting users periodically. The filtered content is then presented to the requesting user in operation, such as for example in a browser window of the user's computer.

Embodiments in this disclosure may be practiced with various computer system configurations including hand-held devices, microprocessor systems, microprocessor-based or programmable consumer electronics, minicomputers, mainframe computers and the like. Embodiments can also be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote processing devices that are linked through a wire-based or wireless network.

In the monetization module 112, the system 100 will compute the commission on money passing through the "marketplace". It is often desirable to charge the commission as money leaves rather than enters the marketplace, to avoid discouraging money from entering the marketplace. For example, the flow of money within the purchase of token occurs from the users to the merchants; therefore the merchants pay the commission to the providers. Similarly, the flow of money within credit card networks is from the users (e.g. card holders) to the merchants; therefore the merchants pay for the use of the credit cards to the credit card provider. Additionally, providers can add paid or free add-on services. For example, a credit card provider may charge an annual fee for the ability to earn perks (e.g. frequent flier miles), or may offer credit card holders free perks. Both types of incentives further increase the value of the network for users and thereby for merchants as well.

Additionally, there is a two-sided networking effect for computer implemented platforms as well. One side consists of the developers and the other side consists of the users. If there are more users of a platform, then developers are more likely to develop applications, and if there are more applications, then more users are likely to adopt the platform.

Additionally, the developers can use the APIs to develop client side applications for the users. A current issue with social networking is friction on the user side. A user generally has to visit a website to fully enjoy the social network. The client side applications can decrease user friction by making the social network always available (e.g. similar to how Outlook makes email readily available).

Moreover, some developers sell digital content. Obviously, it may be unfeasible or undesirable to display advertisements in some digital content. However, the developers charge the users for the digital content, and the system may charge a fee as a commission from the developer. One example of the digital content a developer might sell could be an icon expressing a social event (e.g. a birthday gift icon), or charity gift icon, or a social campaign icon. A birthday gift icon is a commercialized icon, and it may be desirable for the system to charge the developer a commission.
Additionally, a special icon will be created for each charitable project, (e.g. an earthquake or a flood). A
user of a certain level (including, rank and/or title) or authority will earn the right to create and display the icon in their profile. Examples of social campaign icon could be an organ donor icon or a green earth icon. It may be undesirable for the system 100 to charge a commission on a charity icon or a social icon. Another example of digital content a developer might sell includes music which can flow through a social network.
A user can buy music and place it in their profile. Visitors to the profile page can stream the music from the user's profile page. This can be one by a separate app which could be either a paid app or a free app. Additionally, the user may have to pay an additional fee to move the song to a portable device.

In the family rewards and transfer module 106, activities on the gaming application website will allow participants to unlock "rewards" after certain scores are attained for these activities. The rewards can be points, virtual money, or virtual items that can be used on the website. It may also be possible to purchase these rewards on the website through the universal module 102.

For example, the virtual money or tokens can be used to buy food which can be used to feed a virtual pet or purchase other virtual character on the website.
The virtual money may be usable to buy additional things such as clothing, furniture, room decorations, interactive objects, additional virtual pets, medical care, or other, on the website.

Website participants often take actions to increase their scores that will lead to rewards by either buying food for their virtual pets, and other fun activities on the website.

During the day when the children are at school or at other times when the children are busy, parents and other relatives could also visit the site, and play on the site in order to get rewards for their children. For example, the mother of a six-year-old might have logged on to the website, and carried out some of the activities on the website. This may be done in order to get rewards for her child. If done, the game and/or activities may be uninteresting for the parent(s), but their children appreciate the increased rewards for their virtual pets.

An aspect of the application describes a second website, such as for instance, a "parent website" having different kinds of activities intended for a different group of individuals, but that is linked to the first website. Here, the first gaming website is a website intended for children, for example children between 2 and 13 years old, where rewards are earned, and these rewards can be used by the users on the first website.
The second gaming website has social justice or trivia activities intended for adults. The activities may be either age- or gender-specific or both. For instance, such gaming activities can be tailored for interest to a woman of the 30 to 40-year-old age range. The website may charge a fee for entry, or may be supported by advertising.

When an activity of a certain type is successfully carried out on the second website, the user (e.g., the parent) or other adult in the child's life (e.g., a teacher) gets certain kinds of points for carrying out this activity on the second website (e.g., parent website). The points can be transferred to the child's account on the child website.

The child's site may include, for example, a virtual pet or avatar, which is a virtual representation of an animal or person that interacts within a room, chat room, or other activities within an activity center. The child may interact with the virtual pet within the activity center. The activity center may also include virtual furniture, clothing, equipment, as well as other virtual and animated virtual objects.

A status bar shows the accumulated rewards and level (including, rank and/or title). The child can accumulate rewards both on the child's site and also on the parent site, which can include points received from his/her own activities on the child's site and points transferred from others. The rewards can also include earned and transferred items. The items can include, for example, food to feed to the virtual pet, clothing or other items that can be used to dress the virtual pet, or toys or other items that facilitate interaction with the virtual pet within the activity center.

The parent site may hosts different activities that are more appropriate for an adult to carry out, such as crossword puzzles and other puzzles, trivia information, information on parent issues and school issues, child health issues, pregnancy issues, first aid and medical issues, and other family issues. The parent site may provide points as a reward for carrying out certain activities. For example, a parent can take a training course about proper child education and receive points for completing the course.

The parent site may allow using or redeeming the points or rewards on the parent site, but also includes a transfer function. Selection of the transfer function brings up a separate transfer page. The user can select one of multiple different sites, or some other site, here referred to as "new site". Many of the parents may have multiple children, and any or all of these children can be registered in advance on the parent site and allows selection of the recipient for the transfer. A list of the existing registered children or the possibility of adding a new child is also provided. It will also allow an entry of, a personalized message to send along with the transfer.

The transfer screen also includes the ability to decide what specifically will be transferred. A points or virtual cash transfer is possible, where the user enters the number of points they want to transfer into the box. An item transfer may bring up a separate window such as which allows buying an item for transfer. This provides a list of the different items that the parents can buy, the number of points it will take to buy it, and allows purchase and transfer of that item to the child.

When the child has received a transfer, the next time they log in, a pop up transfer notification is displayed. For instance, the notification says "you have received a reward transfer from parent". The transfer may say the number of points or may provide further detail about what the child has received. In this way, the parent can carry out activities that are more interesting to the parent. The actions, however, may still provide rewards to their child.

A specific way in which this is carried out may also use a prize pack which can be awarded or purchased at specified intervals. For example, the adult may be able to purchase or subscribe to a monthly "prize pack". The prize pack allows the adult to send some number of gifts, for example 10 gifts, to the children on the site of their choice.
The prizes are presented by the parent to the child. For example, the parents may encourage good off-line activities and good behavior in the children. In one example, the parent may tell the children that if they go outside and play for an hour, or brush their teeth all week, or clean their room, then they will get a reward. The next time the child logs onto their account, they receive the gift and the message.

As described above, the parent may also receive free rewards such as loyalty points for playing on or otherwise using the parent site. In addition to playing games, the parent site may provide points for completing surveys, clicking on ads, or other conventional website actions. Using the parent site provides loyalty points for the parents. The points can be exchanged for virtual money or special items.

In one embodiment, the items that can be purchased at may be exclusive items that can only be received from the parent site and cannot be obtained at all from the child's site. In this case, the child's site may display the exclusive items, but may appear grayed or faded out, or have some other indication to demonstrate that the items cannot be obtained from the child's site. The child's site may indicate that they can only receive these items by a transfer from the parent site. This may provide further motivation for the parent to carry out actions on the parent site, since the rewards will be even more special. The embodiment may allow cash from one site to be exchanged for cash from another site, as part of the rewards transfer.

Another embodiment may allow a user to block rewards from being received. For example, if the recipient does not want to receive a reward or gift from the transferring person, they can click the "block" button when the message pops up indicating that a reward transfer was received. This can add, for example, the transferee to the user's permanent block list. As a result, the user can effectively block the receipt of gifts or rewards from someone that they do not like or do not want to receive gifts from, or the like.

In this embodiment, a number of different websites allow different activities.
Reward presentations can be transferred from any of these websites to any other website, and used on that other website. As in the above embodiments, the rewards can be used to take an action that could not be taken without the reward, e.g., to purchase an item, or change some aspect of a character or other virtual item on the website. The preschool site is a site intended for younger children, such as preschool age, and more generally can be any site intended for preschool age children.
The preschool site intends to allow user interaction with virtual pets and other activities without requiring reading. These sites described above can generically be considered as sites intended for preschool and elementary school children, e.g. sites which have activities that are intended for preschool and elementary school age children, and as sites which more specifically allow and facilitate interfacing with virtual pets. Apart from such child-specific sites, other sites designed for parental age users who have or care for preschool or elementary school children can operate cooperatively with such child-specific sites.

The competitive matches site enables competitions, where points, bonuses, incentives or other virtual prizes are awarded. Recipients of such rewards can convert and/or apply their rewards earned on the competitive matches site to another site (e.g., another parent's site or a child's site). Other sites described herein may carry out analogous operations for other types of characters, e.g. baseball players, or others.
These sites may also allow training and competitions among the trained characters.
Statistics are maintained on any of these sites, for example the win-loss may be recorded. One advantage of a rewards transfer in this kind of site (e.g., virtual collection site) is that multiple friends can pool their rewards to buy something that they could not otherwise pay for with their individual rewards, for example, and arrange a sharing agreement.

With schools, the educators are presented with different things of interest to professional educators. This also allows the educators to provide rewards to the children in their classes. For example, once a teacher registers on the school site, and registers the names of their children, they may be allowed to provide specified kinds of rewards to the children participating on some other sites based on their grades, homework or class behavior. Any of these sites may allow the rewards earned thereon to be either used on the same site, or to be transferred either as virtual cash, points, or a purchase to another site.

The predetermined privileges can be based on the user's level (including, rank and/or title). In an example embodiment, entry level users will be provided with free access. Members can explore, invite friends, purchase items, plan and attend events.
There will be a wall that members can post their comments and there will be a virtual room/game environment where members can buy virtual goods with tokens that will gain them points to level up (including, rank and/or title). They can also buy and exchange goods, decorate and hang virtual items up on their rooms which they can dynamically drag and drop. There will be bonus points if these virtual goods go towards a good and just cause. In the case of tokens with a charity component, the members will need a real cash contribution and only these special tokens will be able to unlock these virtual goods. As in any social network site like Facebook, the members should be able to perform all other task i.e. upload videos, photos, text, music etc.

As the users advances further new "unlocked" doors will be opened and it will offer additional rewards and new opportunities to level up (including, rank and/or title).
Tagging features will be more prominent as users get with similar interest are bunched into similar communities and they will appear in the user's homepage page as a "recommended" or "suggested" friend. Users in at this level (including, rank and/or title) can also start to make use of the content module to produce wiki's or blogs by filling in the form which will be vetted, approved and posted. Using the content module, users can also sell their own personal goods or User generated content (UGC) through a garage sale option and receives loyalty points for doing so.

As the user advances to the highest level (including, rank and/or title) additional unlocked doors will be available and users can start to gain access to closed door events including meeting with celebrities and inviting them as friend. Users at this level can be allowed to create multiple new campaigns and send out invitations to one or more members or non-members. Using a standard form, the user can enter a campaign name, a link to an external web page, a deadline, a financial goal, an image file, and send this out to be approved. Users will gain access to free rewards and will receive financial sponsorship for expenses and may be even offered a stipend if overseas travel is needed. In addition peer ranking and competition with some form of bar chart or pie chart that will unlock vacations, plasma TV, concert tickets, vouchers etc In order to level a person up to the highest levels (including, rank and/or title), psycho graphic tools such as Integrative Complexity (IC) scorecards can be used to assess and understand users leadership and conflict management styles. One example of this Conflict style tool is known and the Kraybill Conflict style Inventory and was designed by Professor Ronald Kraybill, Centre for Justice and Peacebuilding, Easter Mennonite University in Harrisburg, Virginia USA.

Referring to Figures 12A and 12B, a flow diagram depicting various aspects of one embodiment of the system 100 is shown. In block 1200, the user will input his password and user Id and the system 100 will display the user's level (including, rank and/or title), the charities a user has contributed or helped provide micro finance to and the account balance.

If the user is not already registered as a member, in block 601, the user will input his identity data and the system 100 will check to see if input is valid. For example, the system 100 may check the user's entry to verify that the syntax is correct and/or that there is no information missing from any required field. If the input is valid, the system 100 will update and store the data in a repository.

If the user had received an invitation from another friend, in block 1202, such an invitation may be sent by email or any other means of notification, such as mail, text message, fax or phone. If the new user accepted the friend request and the input is valid, the system 100 sends an email invitation to the existing member and acknowledges that the invitation was sent and accepted to acknowledge his contribution. However, if the person did not accept the membership, the "prospective member" invitation message may still be displayed on the existing member's account.

Once a registered user logs into the system 100, in block 1203, the system 100 checks the user to see if he or she is considered a child. If this is true, in block 1204, the system 100 implements algorithms and computational tools to monitor the actions of each registered and active user. If the system 100 and/or any component thereof detects improper, inappropriate or other conduct that falls within parameters defining a person with criminal, pedophiliac or other conduct characterized to be a risk to children using the system 100, the system 100 identifies the suspicious user and transmits a warning, notification or other alert to the system 100 administrators and/or appropriate personnel. The system 100 then advises the administrators and/or appropriate personnel of the conduct observed and prompts further investigation of the suspicious user. The investigation may constitute further electronic monitoring and/or a full investigation of the suspicious user. If no suspicious behavior is detected, in block 1205, the user is cleared.

In block 1207, the members may make posts. For example, the one or more members may post a comment about how great they think the campaign is. They can also create blogs where users post comments on a particular subject, and the comments are displayed in reverse chronological order, according to the date on which the comment was posted. In block 1209, the system 100 provides a method to generate trusted user generated content (UGC). While most of these UGC is collected from the plurality of social network sites and the collected UGC is correlated with the extended social networks, including identifying the owners of content according to the extended social networks of registered users, some of these UGC could be generated by the user. The system 100 will provide a GUI to allow users to upload videos, audio, text and also a crawler to import contents hosted from other social network websites.
The content is correlated to the owners according to the identities and relationships available in user metadata. The crawler collects UGC in operation by accessing the social network sites. As previously mentioned, the crawler may use an API or a brute force scan to gather the UGC. The user information and the UGC collected is correlated, attributing authorship to registered users independently of where the content was created, and giving access to other users, independently of where their social relationship was established. Users can define what kind of UGC they wish to access and the UGC is filtered according to their definitions in operation. Access can be made on demand, or feeds of information can be delivered to requesting users periodically.
The filtered content is then presented to the requesting user in operation, such as for example in a browser window of the user's computer.

In block 1210, the user can select to a virtual gaming application offering various online games.

In block 1213, the monetization module 112 will then compute the commission on money passing through the "marketplace". It is often desirable to charge the fees as money leaves rather than enters the marketplace, to avoid discouraging money from entering the marketplace. For example, the flow of money within the purchase of token occurs from the users to the suppliers; therefore the suppliers will pay the commission to the providers.

Occasionally, there may also be virtual auctions for limited editions-that is, that limited numbers of the products that are produced, after which, the products can no longer be obtained from the manufacturer. Also, the universal module 102 may also accommodate the user to trade or sell their possessions through a "garage sale" option;
be they virtual or real possessions in exchange for tokens or cash to support or finance this just cause. Other web applications may also be added to the universe that do not include some or all of these features.

In block 1214, if the user decides to make a microloan to the just cause, the system 100 will work with a microfinance institution to provide these loans to people without access to traditional banking systems. One hundred percent of the loan is sent to these microfinance institutions, known as Field Partners, who administer the loans in the field. There will be a network of volunteers who work with these Field Partners, who will edit and translate the borrower stories, and ensure the smooth operation of these programs. 100% of every dollar that is loaned goes directly towards funding loans and there will be no interest charges made to the Field Partners, who will administer these loans.

If the charity or project is new, then in block 1215, the user may create a campaign and associate the created campaign with one or more charities or social justice events and a goal, such as a financial goal or a participation goal. A
campaign is a specific charitable cause (or individual) that the user is passionate about and seeks to support. For example, a user may create a campaign to raise money to support solar panels in a village in India. The campaign may be created by describing the campaign and by selecting a name for the campaign and a date to reach the financial goal for the charitable campaign. Alternatively, in block 1215 the user may also be able to access an individual's "wish list" and decide to send the proceeds to that individual, for example, Sam Broke who is in need of a wheelbarrow for the farm. The user may select the name "Sam Broke" set a goal deadline of Dec. 15, 2011 and describe the campaign by providing the history of Sam Broke and his farm. According to an embodiment, the user may upload one or more images or video to associate with the campaign. In addition, the user may associate the campaign with a link to an external web page. For example, a link may be provided to a web page that lists facts about his work.
According to an embodiment, the user may create one or more campaigns, which all may be active simultaneously at any given time.

In block 1216, the system 100 will compute the peer ranking of each member and there will be an option to vote for each member within the user's community. Users may also post message on bulletin boards to solicit commentary from other users of the system 100. These message boards allow users to use words to convey a message.
The entries may be posted on the virtual message board for all users of the social network to see. When users of the social network participate in the polls and/or post comments on the message boards, and donate money to one or more charities, their score may also increase.

In block 1217, peer ranking scores can be achieved using tools such as social network analysis, although, typically, users ranking will be based on a total monetary value associated with the posted message and the reliability of a user's reputation. A
higher user score could also be obtained if the user has encouraged members or non-members to do a good act and support a just cause. Indeed, the more support the user elicits from the voting process, the higher the user score would be. Social network analysis software (SNA software) facilitates quantitative or qualitative analysis of social networks, by describing features of a network, either through numerical or visual representation. Networks can consist of anything from families, project teams, classrooms, soccer teams, legislatures, nation-states, disease vectors, membership on networking websites like Twitter or Facebook, or even the Internet. Network features can be at the level of individual nodes, dyads, triads, ties and/or edges, or the entire network. For example, node-level features can include network phenomena such as betweeness and centrality, or individual attributes such as age, sex, or income . SNA
software generates these features from raw network data formatted in an edgelist, adjacency list, or adjacency matrix (also called sociomatrix), often combined with (individual/node-level) attribute data (See Hanneman's chapter on network data for further detail). Though the vast majority of network analysis software uses a plain text ASCII data format, some software packages contain the capability to utilize relational databases to import and/or store network features.

In block 1219, a user may invite members or non-members to join his/her user group. An invitation may be sent by email or any other means of notification, such as mail, text message, fax or phone. The user enters individual information in 1220 for a person and the system 100 checks to see if the person is a member. If the person is a member and "existing member invite message" may be displayed to send to the member. According to the embodiment of the present disclosure, the message may be automatically input by the system 100 or manually input by the user. The system 100 also checks to see if the input is valid. If the input is valid, the system 100 sends an email invitation to the existing member and acknowledges that the invitation was sent.
However, if the person is not a member, the "prospective member" invitation message may be displayed to send to the prospective member. According to the embodiment, the message may be automatically input by the system 100 or manually input by the user. The system 100 checks to see if the input is valid. If the input is valid, the system 100 sends an email invitation to the prospective member and acknowledges that the invitation was sent. The invited members or non-members may accept the invitation into the user's group, reject the invitation, or not respond to the invitation. The member or non-members may have a predetermined time in which to accept the invitation to join the user group. For example, a member or non-member may have six months to respond. In addition, a member or non-member who fails to respond or rejects the invitation may change his/her mind any time within the first year.

In block 1221, once a person registers using the New Member's module, he can fill out his profile and invite all of his friends to join his tag Team or community. The user can continue to add people to his team, see who's in other people's tag teams, and check out other people's profiles by clicking on their names. Tags represents the interest of the user. For example, if the user is a great host , she can select a hospitality tag, or if a dancer, painter or a writer, select the Arts tag. A user can give her friends tags (like "Best Friend," etc.) to let them know what she thinks about them.
If the user wants to nudge his friends to give him tags, he can ask them by going to his tag Team page and clicking the hand icon next to each person on his team to ask for tags.

In block 1222, the user may choose to transfer some of his points to their children to encourage them to be socially minded. In block 1223, In the family rewards and transfer module 106, activities on the gaming application website will allow participants to unlock "rewards" after certain scores are attained for these activities. The rewards can be points, virtual money, or virtual items that can be used on the website. It may also be possible to purchase these rewards on the website through the universal module 102. For example, the virtual money or tokens can be used to buy food which can be used to feed a virtual pet or purchase other virtual characters on the website.
The virtual money may be usable to buy additional things such as clothing, furniture, room decorations, interactive objects, additional virtual pets, medical care, or other, on the website. Website participants are encouraged to take actions to increase their scores that will lead to rewards by either buying food for their virtual pets, and other fun activities on the website. During the day when the children are at school or at other times when the children are busy, parents and other relatives could also visit the site, and play on the site in order to get rewards for their children. For example, the mother of a six-year-old might have logged on to the website, and carried out some of the activities on the website. This may be done in order to get rewards for her child. If done, the game and/or activities may be uninteresting for the parent(s), but their children appreciate the increased rewards for their virtual pets. An aspect of the application describes a second website, such as for instance, a "parent website" having different kinds of activities intended for a different group of individuals, but that is linked to the first website. Here, the first gaming website is a website intended for children, for example children between 2 and 13 years old, where rewards are earned, and these rewards can be used by the users on the first website. The second gaming website has social justice or trivia activities intended for adults. The activities may be either age- or gender-specific or both. For instance, such gaming activities can be tailored for interest to a woman of the 30 to 40-year-old age range. The website may charge a fee for entry, or may be supported by advertising. When an activity of a certain type is successfully carried out on the second website, the user (e.g., the parent) or other adult in the child's life (e.g., a teacher) gets certain kinds of points for carrying out this activity on the second website (e.g., parent website). The points can be transferred to the child's account on the child website. The child's site may include, for example, a virtual pet or avatar, which is a virtual representation of an animal or person that interacts within a room, chat room, or other activities within an activity center. The child may interact with the virtual pet within the activity center. The activity center may also include virtual furniture, clothing, equipment, as well as other virtual and animated virtual objects. A
status bar shows the accumulated rewards and level (including, rank and/or title). The child can accumulate rewards both on the child's site and also on the parent site, which can include points received from his/her own activities on the child's site and points transferred from others. The rewards can also include earned and transferred items.
The items can include, for example, food to feed to the virtual pet, clothing or other items that can be used to dress the virtual pet, or toys or other items that facilitate interaction with the virtual pet within the activity center.

If the user is interested to purchase more tokens, in block 1224, the universal module 102 will serve to converts any currency into tokens that can be used on all the web applications throughout the universe. These tokens can also be exchange to the currency of choice on any other social network site in the universe, even in other social networking sites that use their own specific form of virtual cash or tokens.
The tokens may be converted into other social networking sites through an agreed formula.
Alternatively, these tokens may also act as universal virtual cash that can be used directly on any of those sites.

As shown in block 1226, the predetermined privileges can be based on the user level (including, rank and/or title). In an example embodiment, entry level users will be provided with free access. Members can explore, invite friends, purchase items, plan and attend events. There will be a wall that members can post their comments and there will be a virtual room/game environment where members can buy virtual goods with tokens that will gain them points to level up (including, rank and/or title). They can also buy and exchange goods, decorate and hang virtual items up on their rooms which they can dynamically drag and drop. There will be bonus points if these virtual goods go towards a good and just cause. In the case of tokens with a charity component, the members will need a real cash contribution and only these special tokens will be able to unlock these virtual goods. As in any social network site like Facebook, the members should be able to perform all other task i.e. upload videos, photos, text, music etc.

In block 1227, as the users advances further new "unlocked" doors will be opened and it will offer additional rewards and new opportunities to level up (including, rank and/or title). Tagging features will be more prominent as users get with similar interest are bunched into similar communities and they will appear in the user's homepage page as a "recommended" or "suggested" friend. Users in at this level can also start to make use of the content module to produce wiki's or blogs by filling in the form which will be vetted, approved and posted. Using the content module, users can also sell their own personal goods or User generated content (UGC) through a garage sale option and receives loyalty points for doing so.

As the user advances to the highest level (including, rank and/or title) additional unlocked doors will be available and users can start to gain access to closed door events including meeting with celebrities and inviting them as friend. Users at this level can be allowed to create multiple new campaigns and send out invitations to one or more members or non-members. Using a standard form, the user can enter a campaign name, a link to an external web page, a deadline, a financial goal, an image file, and send this out to be approved. Users will gain access to free rewards and will receive financial sponsorship for expenses and may be even offered a stipend if overseas travel is needed. In addition peer ranking and competition with some form of bar chart or pie chart that will unlock vacations, plasma TV, concert tickets, vouchers etc In order to level a person up to the highest levels (including, rank and/or title), psycho graphic tools 1228 such as Integrative Complexity (IC) scorecards can be used to assess and understand users leadership and conflict management styles. One example of this Conflict style tool is known and the Kraybill Conflict style Inventory and was designed by Professor Ronald Kraybill, Centre for Justice and Peacebuilding, Easter Mennonite University in Harrisburg, Virginia USA.

The foregoing embodiments disclose a system for providing, amongst other things, a social network for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns by determining a level of a user (including, rank and/or title) based upon a weighting of one or more criteria indicative of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns, and providing the user with one or more rewards in the social network based upon the level of the user (including, rank and/or title) and/or the rate of advancement of the user between levels (including, rank and/or title).

The system may be further configured to provide one or more of the following:
in response to a request from a user having a predetermined minimum level (including, rank and/or title), create a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network and associated with the user; in response to a request from a user, facilitate a financial contribution from the user to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network (the financial contributions may comprise monetary donations or loans); in response to a request from a user, subscribe the user to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network; provide a marketplace for the sale of virtual items; facilitate a financial contribution to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network, the contribution comprising at least a portion of the proceeds received by a user from the sale of virtual items on the marketplace;
provide a survey to a user and receive a completed survey from the user; receive self-promotional information provided by a user; execute a social network analysis tool to assess a user;
execute an Integrative Complexity (IC) pyschographic tool to assess a user, and other features and functions described or referenced in this disclosure.

The criteria indicative of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns may comprise one or more of the following: the total financial contributions made by other users to charitable or social justice campaigns hosted on the social network and associated with a user; the total number of other users that subscribe to charitable or social justice campaigns hosted on the social network and associated with a user; a completed survey respecting a user, the survey completed by and provided to the system by a user; a completed survey respecting a user, the survey completed by and provided to the system by another user; self promotional information provided to the system by a user; results obtained from the execution of social network analysis tools by the system to assess a user; results obtained from the execution of Integrative Complexity (IC) pyschographic tools to assess a user; the recruitment of well known celebrities to support the campaign; a boot camp may be held where trained mentors and staff will observe the user and determine the user's ability to lead charitable and social justice campaigns; the current position of the user in society and a determination if the user has achieved any success in that position; selection by a group of judges (e.g. people who are credible like current youth leaders and change makers);
selection by trained ethnographers to study users of the system to identify leaders;
interviews of users; selection by other users (e.g. other users can be randomly selected);
and other criteria described or referenced in this disclosure.

The level of a user (including, rank and/or title) may be determined based upon a weighting of one or more criteria indicative of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns. The weighting of criteria can be performed based upon any weighting scheme known in the art. For example, one or more of the criteria could be compared against one or more predetermined thresholds and the degree to which the criteria exceeds these thresholds could then be scaled by a weighting factor. The weighting factor could be a fixed value or a dynamic value dependent on characteristics of the criteria. For example, if the criteria is the financial contributions made by users of the system 100 to a user's campaigns hosted by the system 100, the weighting factor may vary depending on the source of the contribution (e.g. financial contributions made by users having a higher degree of separation from the user in the social network may receive a lower weighting than financial contributions made from users having a lower degree of separation from the user). This example can be represented mathematically as follows:

Weighting of financial contributions to a user campaigns = (monetary contribution to user's campaigns) x (degree of separation of contributor from user) x (weighting factor) It will be apparent to one skilled in the art that various weighting schemes may be provided to the weighting each criterion individually, as well as, the weighting of all relevant criteria as a whole. The value resulting from the weighting all of the relevant criteria for a user may be compared against one or more fixed thresholds, or one or more values resulting from the weighting of other users of the system 100, in order to assign a level to the user (including, rank and/or title).

[0002] In another example, social network analysis tools may be applied to develop and identify leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns.
These tools may assess a user based upon one or more criteria and assumptions. For example, people who are not active in the social network will have very few connections in the system, however, this may have no reliable relation to their connectedness and influence in the "real world". Also, social networking "evangelists" may send as many or more invitations as they receive to join a social network. They can be detected because they have both a high number of contacts and high acceptance rates. Further, members who automatically invite their entire address book may have a high number of connections but may have lower than average acceptance rates and low average strength of connections. When members accept the invitations of people they do not know well, acceptance rates go up. However, this kind of acceptance is may not be a good measure of influence in the "real world". When strength of connections is not readily measurable in the on-line community, this can be very hard to detect.
Also, highly influential and popular people who automatically invite their entire address books may have low acceptance rates, and low average strength of connections, but may also have a large number of strong connections. Thus their invitation acceptance rates may be higher than the majority of "invitation spammers" who are typically not as influential.
In addition, invitations sent to people who are currently not members of the social networking system will usually have lower acceptance rates than invitations sent to people who are already members, thus this factor may also be taken into account.

[0003] Thus, based upon the foregoing, the criteria for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns may include one or more of: people with a large number of mutually confirmed connections tend to be influential and well connected; people who receive large numbers of invitations tend to be more influential than people who receive few invitations; people who receive more invitations than they send tend to be more influential than people who send more invitations than they receive; people whose total invitations received and accepted are larger than the number of invitations sent and accepted tend to be more influential (By not counting invitations that are not accepted by either party, this metric removes variances in invitation acceptance rates that are not related to levels of influence and popularity, for example influential people who automatically invite their entire contact list without filtering it for relationship strength); people with larger number of invitations accepted are more popular than those with lower numbers; and people whose invitation acceptance rate is closer to 1 (determined by a ratio of total invitations sent by target and accepted by recipients/total invitations sent by target (ISA/IS)) tend to be more influential than people with a smaller acceptance rate.

The rewards provided to the user may comprise one or more of the following:
permitting a user to create one or more charitable or social justice campaigns on the social network; displaying a user level of a user (including, rank and/or title) in association with the user's activities on the social network, the user level (including, rank and/or title) awarded by the system to the user based upon the level of the user (including, rank and/or title); providing a user with an accreditation; providing a user with free access to the social network; providing a user with wares, services or opportunities;
providing a user with virtual currency useable on the social network; providing a user with virtual items useable on the social network (the virtual item may comprise displaying a tag in association with the user's activities on the social network); permitting a user to sell virtual items on the social network; permitting a user to create virtual items on the social network; permitting a user to nominate other users as having leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns; permitting a user to upload and host user content on the social network; invite friends to join the system or campaigns;
explore, purchase items, plan and attend events; decorate and hang virtual items up on their rooms which they can dynamically drag and drop; upload videos, photos, text, music etc.; access new locked door features; access to tagging features; produce wiki's or blogs on hosted on the system; sell their own personal goods or User generated content (UGC) through a garage sale option; meeting with celebrities and inviting them as friend; create multiple new campaigns and send out invitations to one or more members or non-members to join the campaigns; and rewards such as plasma TV, concert tickets, vouchers etc.; and other rewards described or referenced in this disclosure.
While particular embodiments of the present invention have been described in the foregoing, it is to be understood that other embodiments are possible within the scope of the invention and are intended to be included therein. It will be clear to any person skilled in the art that modifications of and adjustments to this invention, not shown at this writing, are possible without departing from the spirit of the invention as demonstrated through the exemplary embodiments.

Claims (30)

1. A system for providing a social network for developing and identifying leaders for charitable and social justice campaigns, the system comprising at least one processor and at least one memory, the memory having stored thereon a database for storing information respecting users and instructions for execution by the processor to provide the social network, the system configured to:

(a) determine a level of a user based upon a weighting of one or more criteria indicative of the user's leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns; and (b) provide the user with one or more rewards in the social network based upon the level of the user and/or the rate of advancement of the user between levels.

2. The system of claim 1, the system further configured to, in response to a request from a user having a predetermined minimum level, create a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network and associated with the user.

3. The system of any one of claims 1 to 2, the system further configured to, in response to a request from a user, facilitate a financial contribution from the user to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network.

4. The system of claim 3, wherein the financial contributions comprise monetary donations or loans.

5. The system of any one of claims 1 to 4, the system further configured to, in response to a request from a user, subscribe the user to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network.

6. The system of any one of claims 1 to 5, the system further configured to provide a marketplace for the sale of virtual items.

7. The system of claim 6, the system further configured to facilitate a financial contribution to a charitable or social justice campaign hosted on the social network, the contribution comprising at least a portion of the proceeds received by a user from the sale of virtual items on the marketplace.

8. The system of any one of claims 1 to 7, the system further configured to provide a survey to a user and receive a completed survey from the user.

9. The system of any one of claims 1 to 8, the system further configured to receive self-promotional information provided by a user.

10. The system of any one of claims 1 to 9, the system further configured to execute a social network analysis tool to assess a user.

11. The system of any one of claims 1 to 10, wherein the system is further configured to execute Integrative Complexity (IC) pyschographic tools to assess a user.

12. The system of any one of claims 1 to 11, wherein the criteria comprises the total financial contributions made by other users to charitable or social justice campaigns hosted on the social network and associated with a user.

13. The system of any one of claims 1 to 12, wherein the criteria comprises the total number of other users that subscribe to charitable or social justice campaigns hosted on the social network and associated with a user.

14. The system of any one of claims 1 to 13, wherein the criteria comprises a completed survey respecting a user, the survey completed by and provided to the system by a user.

15. The system of any one of claims 1 to 14, wherein the criteria comprises a completed survey respecting a user, the survey completed by and provided to the system by another user.

16. The system of any one of claims 1 to 15, wherein the criteria comprises self promotional information provided to the system by a user.

17. The system of any one of claims 1 to 16, wherein the criteria comprises results obtained from the execution of social network analysis tools by the system to assess a user.

18. The system of any one of claims 1 to 17, wherein the criteria comprises results obtained from the execution of Integrative Complexity (IC) pyschographic tools to assess a user.

19. The system of any one of claims 1 to 18, wherein the rewards comprise permitting a user to create one or more charitable or social justice campaigns on the social network.

20. The system of any one of claims 1 to 19, wherein the rewards comprise displaying a user level of a user in association with the user's activities on the social network, the user level awarded by the system to the user based upon the level of the user.

21. The system of any one of claims 1 to 20, wherein the rewards comprise providing a user with an accreditation, rank or title.

22. The system of any one of claims 1 to 21, wherein the rewards comprise providing a user with free access to the social network.

23. The system of any one of claims 1 to 22, wherein the rewards comprise providing a user with wares, services or opportunities.

24. The system of any one of claims 1 to 23, wherein the rewards comprise providing a user with virtual currency useable on the social network.

25. The system of any one of claims 1 to 24, wherein the rewards comprise providing a user with virtual items useable on the social network.

26. The system of claim 25, wherein the virtual item comprises displaying a tag in association with the user's activities on the social network.

27. The system of any one of claims 1 to 26, wherein the rewards comprise permitting a user to sell virtual items on the social network.

28. The system of any one of claims 1 to 27, wherein the rewards comprise permitting a user to create virtual items on the social network.

29. The system of any one of claims 1 to 28, wherein the rewards comprise permitting a user to nominate other users as having leadership potential for charitable and social justice campaigns.

30. The system of any one of claims 1 to 29, wherein the rewards comprise permitting a user to upload and host user content on the social network.