In this day and age there are quite a few different uses for Facebook, but the makers of Bincam might have come up with the most original way to take advantage of the site yet.
While we all know that you can use Facebook to take a pictoral walk down memory lane and show off just how many friends you have on the social networking site by tattooing their names onto your arm, but the makers of Bincam have found a way to use the site to actually shame people into changing what it is they throw away over the course of the day.
Perhaps the best part about BinCam is the sheer simplicity of it. The contraption is nothing more than your average, everyday waste can with a mobile phone attached to the underside of the lid. In this case the phone is a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 that is set to take pictures of anything you throw into the bin over the course of the day. The phone is geared to then broadcast these pictures to your Facebook account so that anyone who wants to can get a first hand look at your trash.
Of course the main reason for doing this is not because people who use Facebook are abnormally interested in what they are throwing away on a daily basis. The purpose of Bincam is to hopefully get your Facebook friends to yell at you because you are just throwing away either too much stuff, or you are throwing away stuff that would be better off going into the recycling bin. In essence, the Bincam will attempt to make you feel bad about what is going in the trash, without making you feel so bad that you just disconnect the camera.
The researchers behind this project say that there is enough social science data available to make a pretty accurate prediction that the peer pressure that can occur from having even digital friends lecture you about your waste habits will be enough to change your habits for the better in this case and users will work to change their less than desirable waste habits.
