This morning Chris Kelly announced on the Facebook blog that the company is actively working to support Hurricane Gustav Victims. In addition to directing users located in the Gulf Coast to the FEMA website from the Facebook homepage, Facebook is also encouraging users to check out the Causes application. This comes a day after MySpace announced the launch of a FEMA widget on their site.

It’s interesting to see Facebook use their power to promote the Causes application so heavily. Then again the Causes application appears to be the application of choice for promoting good will. It’s great to see the large social networks throwing their weight behind significant domestically. It would be great if all the social networks made it a habit of promoting good will on a regular basis rather than wait for national disasters.

This isn’t a realistic expectation though given that all the social networks are profit driven. Imagine if the major social networks created a similar campaign to the Stand Up 2 Cancer campaign being promoted by the large television networks. It would be interesting to measure the difference in impact between the two campaigns. It’s great to see that the large social networks are at least supporting cause oriented activities!