From Twitter 03-16-2010

( Cut to spare the uninterested )

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Interesting Twitter application for petitions: Act.ly

Check out http://act.ly for an interesting new approach for social and political activism. Anyone with a Twitter account can create a petition, urging anyone else with a Twitter account to do something. I'm following The Innocence Project on Twitter (@innocenceblog), and this tweet caught my eye:

TX execution set for 3/24 despite untested DNA. Petition @GovernorPerry to stop the execution http://act.ly/1tr

Curious, I clicked on the link, which took me to the http://act.ly site, where I found a page with information about a pending death penalty case. All I had to do was to re-tweet, and my tweet lands in Governor Perry's tweet in-basket. And the governor, if he likes, can reply via http://act.ly. Curious, I did a little poking around the site. I found, for example, a petition urging Rick Warren to speak out against the pending law in Uganda that would put homosexuals to death. Rick Warren responded to the tweet and posted a video message he sent out to Ugandan pastors, urging them against supporting the bill.

The application was invented by @slowdive and @jgilliam, in order to, as they put it, shake up a political system that's broken.

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