From reacting to the Haiti disaster to raising funds for a kids school in Tanzania, social media continues to show just how much we can make a change where before we may have thought there was nothing we could do.

A perfect example of this is the CitizenGulf project, which my friend  Geoff is a part of.

Organized by a mix of business owners, cause marketers and social good causes, the CitizenGulf project aims to help fishing families affected by the recent BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf Coast.

As the clean-up for the mess continues and red tape and legal issues hold up some of the aid packages, CitizenGulf wants to help make a difference now. The great thing about the project is that it takes very little from us to get involved, yet it can make a huge difference to those affected.

This includes the fishing families whose livelihoods have been destroyed; locals affected by how the economy has been hit by the spill; and wildlife left to fend for themselves without our aid.

And with hurricane season fast approaching this area, the need for our help is clear.

So how can you help?

There are a ton of events planned around the U.S. to benefit the area, and you can find these locations here. If your city isn’t on there yet but you want to help, you can contact the CitizenGulf team to organize your own event.

You can also donate to organizations recommended by CitizenGulf, if you prefer that.

The oil spill in the Gulf is one of the biggest ecological and corporate disasters in the U.S in recent times. CitizenGulf wants to give us an easy way we can help the locals and the landscape.

Seems a pretty straightforward decision, no?

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That’s why this news seemed more interesting than just the usual talk. TechCrunch reports that Facebook has announced the 20 winners of a competition to be included in a program to help them develop their platforms with a combination of money and other benefits.

Twenty companies, which include two nonprofits, will take part in a program headed by Founders Fund’s Dave McClure, and will have the chance to work with Facebook engineers and a range of Silicon Valley veterans. Facebook intends to keep us posted on the startups’ progress throughout the session, and will be holding a demo day at the end of the summer to help expose the companies to investors and press.

The list of companies are focused primarily in companies that are either social networking platforms like MyChurch.org or RunThere which is a social platform for runners and cyclists or other applications and services that facilitate online social interaction. McClure is interested in helping these folks get to business with this program.

it will emphasize getting the companies to release and iterate their products quickly, rather than spending a long time on the development cycle.

While there are two non-profits on the roster the fund is not operating as such. In other words they aren’t doing this for free. McClure says

The average amount of investment is $25,000, with over $500,000 being distributed in total (the non-profits are excluded from receiving funding, but are invited to the program for free). Investments are being made as a convertible note, with a discount for future priced rounds. fbFund is taking roughly a 1-5% stake in each company (around 2% for most of them), which is in line with what other incubators have been doing.

No word on any other Incubalooza events in the future but it might be a good time for aspiring social networking companies to set up camp in Facebook town. As we have noted recently, they do have the money.

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Google may have finally heard your collective sighs of frustration mixed with a little boredom, as they’ve announced the new Google Analytics Help Forum.

That’s right, a forum. A place where you can ask questions, and get answers… specific answers!

You’ll be in direct contact with Google employees, top contributors, seasoned Analytics pros, and new posters. Worried that only n00bs will be "helping" you out? Fret not; answers are voted on by the community, with only the "Best Answers" gaining the visibility. Too make things even easier on you, as your typing your question a list of "Related Questions" will pop up.

If you’re afraid of change, and liked the old Help Center it’s still there. You can search until your heart’s content, but it is closed for new posts. This allows the Analytics team to give their full attention to the new forum.

Just the little things that can add so much convenience to your daily web use like the definition or movies web search features.

This one doesn’t exactly apply to web search, but the Google Operating System Blog has brought up an interesting feature that is present in a variety of Google’s services.

That feature would be the ability to download the entire help file for each respective feature to avoid having to go through the process of navigating through complex hierarchies or searching.

To bring up a very detailed (and frequently updated) help file for a Google service, just simply add ?fulldump=1 to the end of earch help center’s URL, and you will have a nice lengthy document you can store away on your hard drive for safe keeping or print out as a desktop reference guide.

Ionut Alex Chitu suggests converting the files to PDFs.

It works for Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Calendar, AdSense, Picasa, Analytics,  and a variety of others (see the full list at Google OS Blog).

One of my favorite things about Google from the average user’s perspective is that they’re always giving us ways to find things more conveniently.