Thankfulfor – Giving Thanks Online
This is a unique and, well, heartening concept. Most of us spend a lot of our time online reading news or working. Neither of those are necessarily uplifting in their own right. While social networking can be fun and even fulfilling, in the end most of our feeds are likely mostly news or work-related anyway.
Thankfulfor.com wants to ad a little happiness and gratitude into our streams. It’s basically Twitter with flowers and sunshine, I’d say.
You sign in with your Twitter account and leave status updates with whatever you’re thankful for or happy about at the moment. These updates may or may not be tweeted, at your discretion. You can also step into other peoples’ Thankfulfor streams to see what they’re grateful for.
I’ll be honest. In the beginning, I wasn’t really all that enthused about this site. I thought it would be full of hokey “feel good” blabber and dumb sayings involving trees and clouds and whatnot. Amazingly, I ended up spending a lot of time there and found it very fun. Sure, there are some who put a lot of Ren and Stimpy Happy-Happy, Joy-Joy into their streams, but most people are posting real things they’re grateful for or real platitudes of happiness.
One women said that she was thankful for the morning rays of sunshine as this was her 90th birthday. Another was surprised to find a box of baby gear on her porch, left anonymously, as they are expecting and her husband lost his job. Yet another learned that her sister was coming home from Iraq safe and sound. A lot of great things on Thankfulfor that, well, really make you think about what you’re glad to have.
It’s an inspiring site and worth participating in. The sites creators are Jen Consalvo and Frank Gruber, whose company ShinyHeart Ventures, is a side project with which they create happiness-building sites like Thankfulfor.
