Facebook’s announcement today that it will let users update their status to indicate that they’re organ donors might not have been the type of life-saving news that people were expecting.

But viewed as the possible start of something bigger, it gets a lot more interesting.

Sure, lots of companies are involved in philanthropy and social initiatives. But Facebook is in a unique position to make a massive impact (positive or negative) thanks to its huge population of users, now numbering more than 900 million.

“We never could have anticipated that what started as a small network would evolve into such a powerful tool for communication and problem solving,” said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in a post announcing the organ donation initiative. “As this happens, we hope to build tools that help people transform the way we all solve worldwide social problems.”

Here’s the big question: What next?

For more, see Good Morning America’s interview with Zuckerberg.

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