Facebook Falling Behind Yahoo & Google in Online Green Race

If you need to keep your building cool, why not put it in a place that's freezing most of the year?

Yahoo is building a new data center in Lockport, NY, not far from Niagara Falls, that will be cooled in part by the bitter winds that blow off Lake Ontario. (As a Syracuse University graduate, I can vouch for how effective the lake wind is at cooling.)

Google had an idea to go one step further, filing a patent for an offshore data center that would use wave power for energy & ocean water for cooling. But Google filed the patent in 2008 & there doesn't seem to be any public evidence it's moving forward.

Yahoo & Google have been doing their part to reduce their carbon footprints, but what about Facebook? For its new data center, Facebook chose coal power. Facebook is now the target of a Greenpeace campaign to reject dirty coal, featuring this wicked awesome parody of the upcoming movie about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network:

Should Facebook Have Banished Ranger Rick?

Coworkers here at the National Wildlife Federation were up in arms earlier this week as word spread that Facebook had canceled Ranger Rick's account. Any attack on Ranger Rick is an attack on The Green Miles, because we're one and the same in Arlington's Neighborhood Day parade each year (to the right is RR/TGM with Arlington County Board Chair Paul Ferguson).

Granted, Ranger Rick is not an actual person, a nominal violation of Facebook's rules that require a profile represent a real person. Facebook says nonprofits can still use the group function.

However, you could easily counter that by saying Facebook allows pseudo-profiles of politicians all the time. Anyone think the actual Hillary Clinton is checking who tagged her wall today? And for nonprofits like the NWF, creating a group or mascot profile protects the privacy of the staffers who work to reach out to members through social networking sites. Does Hillary's Facebook staffer wants to have his/her personal info out there for 35,000 supporters to see?

But here's the bottom line -- of all the fake profiles on Facebook, why has Facebook targeted the beloved Ranger Rick? A quick search shows six fake Paris Hilton profiles. Why kill off Ranger Rick? Would it really have torn a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum to look the other way while Ranger Rick spread cuteness across the Internet?

If you think Ranger Rick was unjustly targeted, join the Set Ranger Rick Free Facebook group, and tell Facebook to knock it off by emailing them here.