San Francisco takes a lot of crap from the national media about being a tree-hugging, looney-liberal enclave that is completely out of touch with their idea of life. I say they’re just jealous that they don’t get to live in such an awesome city (and county, for those of you wanting to be technical).  Take, for example, our 311 service. It is one number that allows city residents to report any type of issue, problem, or concern without having to know which particular city bureaucracy is responsible for fixing the problem you encounter.

I know, I know you’re saying you’ve got that too. We aren’t the only city to have it, but according to the city paper, we are the first city to have our 311 service fully integrated with facebook!

That’s right, the city of San Francisco has married their 311 technology with facebook so that you can report problems while simultaneously stalking your favorite crush and keeping up to date on what your friends are busy not doing at work. Or, um, doing whatever you might do on facebook. 🙂

 

The app is very simple to use, and is easily accessed of the city of SF’s page on facebook. You can see it in the image to your left, highlighted in gray text. You do not have to have a facebook account to use the service, and you can anonymously report issues if you want to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this example, I’ve typed in sidewalk and it has given me a whole list of options. Once I find the right problem, I can add my information, the location, and submit a picture as well if I like. Then – voila – the information is routed to the correct city department and I’ve just managed to make my city a better place without ever having to step away from facebook.

The only criticism I have is that at this time the facebook app doesn’t support secure connections, which means if you have set facebook to login via https it won’t work. Hopefully they will have this addressed soon (it isn’t a problem unique to only this facebook app), as it currently stands after I used the app I had to reset my privacy setting to use https, which is really kind of annoying.

Overall, city of San Francisco, I’ll give you a 7 out of 10 on this one. Fix the https issue and I’ll bump it up some more!