If you’ve a request to change something (also known as a petition) and would like people especially on social networking websites to sign it, then you should give act.ly a try. Developed by Jim Gilliam and Jesse Haff, Act.ly is a free and simple application aims to help Twitterers create petitions and make use of the large community to sign them.
To start a petition, simply identify a target by entering in his/her Twitter username and then type in what you want the person to do or not to do. You signed the petition by tweeting it and anybody can sign it too by just re-tweeting it. What’s more is that the person which you’ve targeted earlier on will be able to view the tweets in their mentions. He or she has to click on the link and log in with their Twitter account to respond. The system then sends a DM to the person who started the petition to verify if it’s completed. According to the folks at act.ly, they have planned to add several new features in the near future and one of them includes a powerful set of analytics since nearly the entire social graph on Twitter is public.
Creating and signing a petition on act.ly is pretty useful as users are able to receive their results quickly all thanks to Twitter’s large community. For example, I start tweeting and my followers re-tweet it. The petition can easily reach the other end of the world when more people re-tweet your petition. In the end, your petition target would have no choice but to respond to what’s on the petition and close the “case”.