Ten Minutes With Ripple May 9, 2007

Intro: Ripple is a Melbourne-based charity that uses revenue from ads to help charities. You don’t give any money — you just view an ad — or set ripple as your home page.

Exec Sum: Great idea, and works well. Do it.

My tenminut.es: Nicely designed site, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do and whether I had to cough up money. I didn’t and you don’t. Either you click on one of four boxes denoting charities (water, food, education or money) and then view an ad before scrolling down to the Google search box. Alternatively set ripple as your home page and do your Google searches from there: a portion of any ad money made from your search goes to ripple which passes it all on to the charities.

Setting ripple as your home page in Firefox is easy: Just drag the icon to the homepage icon on your toolbar. Or you can download a ripple Searchbar.

Verdict: Beautifully simple and effective way to help charity. Only nag: One ad didn’t appear. Otherwise seamless, and nice to look at, too.

Score: 9 out of 10