The Top Floor Flat

It’s become increasingly popular to “donate your facebook status” to various charities and causes. And overall, it’s a great idea – you show your support, you can quickly raise awareness amongst all of your friends and you get that warm fuzzy feeling of having done something good. Karma points all around. But amidst the general chatter and noise of Facebook, a status update for charity is, literally, the least you can do. So what’s the next step?

Lovebox, a new London startup and brainchild of The House London, thinks they’ve hit on a new way to spread the word about charities and show some internet love for various causes all through a little pink box. In their own words,

Lovebox is a digital wristband to help raise money and awareness for different charities around the world via the web. Each month we add another good cause and featured charity for you to support…. Social networks and the internet help us share information quickly. Lovebox is a simple but effective way for you to show your support for charities.

Imagine checking out your favourite social network and all you see is Lovebox! Swap your profle pic for a Lovebox avatar.

As Lovebox is still in Beta stage at the moment, their features are pretty limited. All that is currently available is the downloadable Lovebox image – for ease of use when you’re ready to swap it in place of your current profile pic on various social networks, and their current charity of choice, Cancer Research UK.

There are a couple of issues with the service that hopefully will be addressed as the site grows. The selection of only one charity per month as the Lovebox supported cause is slightly problematic as not all charities appeal to all supporters. Also, convincing us self-involved web users to change our digital signature, that is, our ever-present profile picture, might not be quite as easy as convincing us to change our profile statuses. Also problematic is the fact that profile pictures are not clickable links so a sea of Loveboxes is all well and good, but if others don’t know what they mean and have no way of finding out, it can be a bit of a challenge to get the word out.

Yet issues and growing pains aside, Lovebox certainly has a lovely vision: a sea of pink hearts, Loveboxes, covering the face of social networks across the planet. From Twitter to Facebook, MySpace to Bebo, Hi5 to IMVU, a Lovebox just might become the universal sign of giving and charitable donations if the Lovebox team has anything to say about it. And the appearance of one box can cause hundreds of others on the network to sit up, take notice and consider supporting a charity themselves.

So what are you waiting for? Download your very own Lovebox and start showing a little love today.