Join Kiva for a Developer Drink-up

Image:Kiva.org logo.svg

Halle is interning at Kiva, which, given her personality, I figure is her dream internship.

Kiva is a microfinance site for the poor that allows anyone to give flat-rate microloans via PayPal. As a coincidence of the “I seem to have a lot of cash” and my New Year’s resolution to be a more responsible person, I’ve recently started to put a tiny fraction of my income into Kiva. You can view my lender page here to see that I currently participate in 17 microloans.

I mention all this because Kiva will be sponsoring a Developers Happy Hour this Thursday at their headquarters in San Francisco. Considering I give 5% of my money lent back to Kiva, I’m going for the drinks. 🙂

(Find out more about the concept from Muhammad Yunus’s Nobel lecture, the FrontLine program on social entrepreurship, conservative columnist Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the New York Times, and the books Banker To the Poor, and Creating a World Without Poverty.)

Continue reading about Moneywatch.com after the jump

I’m popular, attractive, and self-confident!

Great news today! Halle blogs another gem about some social “research” results:

“One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.”

High number of friends == attractive? Score! And what happens at 800? Does the Facebook CS team come and beat you with an ugly stick? I thought you’re supposed to troll their tagged pictures to decide about this one. And now that they’ve ajaxified the photos page, it’s oh so easy to do!

Unlike Halle, I’m under 800 friends, but I think it’s getting close. I better stop accepting friend requests…

Okay, one more friend.

Okay, maybe one more friend. 🙂