99 Red Balloons... well 10

DARPA Network Challenge 2009

While this doesn't pertain to libraries in particular it does how the potential of what social networking can do for people around the world.

Back in 2009 there was a challenge sent out to find ten red weather balloons by DARPA or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  The winners would get $40,000 for finding all 10 of the balloons.

Anyway the wiki article has all of the details but what I wanted to point out is that all of the groups were using social networking to get information from and to people.  Even going so far as to spread false information to try and keep people off of the trail of the real information.  And in the end the group who won (MIT) did so in 9 hours.

I would highly recommend reading about their strategies and some of the other details as well.