"One of the most important ideas he developed, dubbed “targeted sharing,” now forms the basis of Edgeflip’s first product. It’s a Facebook app that prompts people to share information from a nonprofit, but only with those friends predicted to respond favorably. That’s a big change from the usual scattershot approach of posting pleas for money or help and hoping they’ll reach the right people.
Edgeflip’s app, like the one Ghani conceived for Obama, will ask people who share a post to provide access to their list of friends. This will pull in not only friends’ names but also personal details, like their age, that can feed models of who is most likely to help.
Say a hurricane strikes the southeastern United States and the Red Cross needs clean-up workers. The app would ask Facebook users to share the Red Cross message, but only with friends who live in the storm zone, are young and likely to do manual labor, and have previously shown interest in content shared by that user. But if the same person shared an appeal for donations instead, he or she would be prompted to pass it along to friends who are older, live farther away, and have donated money in the past."
