Graham nails it again—making the connection between benevolence, non-profits, and start-ups. This is a topic near and dear to my start-up, Mobile Commons. We’re a little different than our friends at tumblr, hypem, or other consumer-facing start-ups. They all have lots of users and fans because they build great services and interact with their users directly.

One of the hard things about what we do is that we have a more abstract relationship with our users. A huge portion of our direct users are non-profits, unions, and political campaigns and it is through them that we interact with millions of other people. It means that as we craft our products, we have to be congnizant of our direct users and our indirect users and try to ensure a great experience for all of them. By making a great experience all-around, we know that our customers will love us and consumers will continue to use our customers’ services built on top of our software. Sometimes, it’s really easy to get caught up in all these abstractions and dwell on minutiae.

It’s really nice to read an essay like Be Good and remember that we have a pretty high horse to get up on—our customers use our services to promote civil liberty, save the earth, fight injustice, and raise awareness around the world. And that everyday people reciprocate. In the new space of the web and social media, people are far more apt to be friends with Save Darfur than they are with a consumer brand.

So Mobile Commons’ tamagotchi is mobile communications. We’ve enabled organizations to take their message and cause and bring it everywhere. They’ve trusted us with their data, their message, and their constituents. We need to keep adding more power, more simplicity, and take care of the trust that they’ve placed in us.