Watch a demo video or use it directly with your friends on Facebook.

This Facebook app allows users to profile their lifestyle around their carbon emissions. By selecting the appliances in your home and entering data around your lifestyle, users can get an overview of their carbon impact, which at least in my case was pretty astonishing. Who would expect that driving my car adds sevent-something percent of my carbon foot print? Try it for yourself and bend your mind: SAP Carbon Exploration.

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This Facebook app challenges users to be more green than their friends and neighbours. The idea is that a users utility use would be used to measure the green footprint of the user. The app is connected to smart meters to read the consumption. This application can be used on facebook, by following the link to the Home Carbon Challenge.

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A carbon footprint concept with the focus on the private citizen is Seeds. In this mobile application users earn seeds that they can grow in virtual flower pots, when they do something good for the environment. An activity feed informs you about what good things friends in your social network did, like recycling 20 sheets of paper, that they carpooled today to work, that they exchanged an old bulb with an incandescent bulb etc. Each activity rewards you with seeds, and after a certain number of seeds and taking care of your virtual garden, you achieve status and new levels. Crowd funding larger green initiatives include the installation of solar panels on community buildings, helps you collaborate towards larger goals. And once you reach certain mastery, imagine creating new challenges for the users.

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The first concept for a serious app around sustainability was SAP Carbon Impact Reward, done by a team in SAP Labs Palo Alto. By interviewing more than 100 people, the team focused on exploring people's attitudes and reactions to sustainability, identify key areas of concerns, determine what motivates people to take personal action and examine the language used and needed around sustainability. It was important for the team to focus on what users do, not what they say they care about. If their concerns are environmental degradation, oil consumption, wasteful consumer culture etc., you need to look at the actions they take in their daily life, like recycling, biking, buying organic food.

An important aspect here was how such an application would fit into the daily life of the users and ideally would not require the users to change their lifestyle. Don't focus on the big picture, give them small steps fitting into their behavior. The design principles for such an application should motivate effectively. This can be done by an easy and fast calculation of the financial benefits, how the behavior benefits the next generation (aka their children) and by avoiding a blame game. If the app leverages community influence, like through friends or colleagues in social media and is not authoritative, teaching and finger pointing from above, the better. For all that you need to build trust. Facilitate sharing information and knowledge about sustainable behavior with your friends and let them easily understand goals and their status. The final principle adds rewards to it, promotes competition and sends users on missions (known as actionable but not general or obvious recommendations).