Going Google for Giving

Looking to give back? Look no further than Google.

The search giant kicked off its massive support behind President Barack Obama’s United We Serve campaign this week with All for Good, a charitable project aimed at helping people find and share ways to “do good.”

Tonic's Marc Hertz first reported on the project last week.

This Monday and Tuesday, Google’s sacred home page (sacred in terms of the white space rarely being used to provide links to anything) provided a "volunteer" link to help users find giving opportunities in their community.

As All Good’s blog page explains the effort is expanding each day.

There is now a widget for websites, blogs, Gmail and iGoogle homepages for tracking and browsing volunteer activities.

There's a Google page gadget for tracking donations as well.

A new application, called Catalista, lets you find real-time, local opportunities on a mobile phone and also track the impact of and rate your volunteering experience.

Of course Google and All Good offered up something for developers as well. A special API was set up to help build applications using the site’s opportunities.

All for Good is also working with other media giants, such as MTV, which just launched serve.mtv.com. YouTube launched YouTube’s Video Volunteers. That effort puts video makers in touch with nonprofits to broadcast causes through video.

And that's just the start, according to Adam Sah, engineering tech lead at Google:

We’ll keep adding new innovations as they’re created by the team and the growing developer community-at-large. We love the feedback we’ve been getting from you so far. Keep it coming and get out there and start doing good.

The All for Good product was built as a "Google 20-percent" project (Google lets engineers spend 20 percent of their work time on projects that interest them).

All for Good is supported by Our Good Works (OGW), a nonprofit developed to propel design of open-source technology in the public interest. Its board of directors is a list of who's who in educational leadership, tech evangelism, wireless leadership and social networking innovation, and include:

Jonathan Greenblatt, Member, Faculty, Anderson School of Management, UCLA (President, OGW) Chris DiBona, Director, Open Source, Google (Treasurer OGW) Susan Nesbitt, Director, Online Programs Craigslist Foundation (Secretary OGW) Randi Zuckerberg, Director of Marketing, Facebook Craig Newmark, Founder and Customer Service Representative, craigslist Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chairman, LinkedIn Michelle Nunn, CEO, HandsOn Network / Points of Light Foundation Bill Strathman, CEO, Network for Good Paul Schmitz, CEO, Public Allies David Cohen, Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation David Eisner, former CEO, Corporation for National and Community Service Ami Dar, Founder and CEO, Idealist Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Founder and CEO, FanFeedr

As All for Good’s blog notes, Americans contributed more than 8 billion hours helping communities through volunteer efforts last year.

There’s little doubt, given the power of social networking and the All for Good push, that number will be much greater in 2009.