I’m getting to be real impressed with Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org.

No, he doesn’t have the glitterati status of his counterpart at Facebook, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. (Is anyone else getting a little sick of the Church of Zuckerberg? Yes, Time Magazine, we know he’s 23 and went to Harvard. Enough already!)

What Ben does have is a very sweet social networking platform for do-gooders. And more importantly, he has a truly 2.0 attitude about how Change.org can be most effective. Instead of trying to capture a social-networking-for-good community just on Change.org, he is actively building bridges to other platforms — Facebook, Myspace, etc — in the hopes of simply creating a better network.

I know this because he’s offered to work with me and one of my clients to build an exciting new “community-within-all-communities” application. It would allow nonprofits to create semi-private, semi-branded networks specifically for their constituents, while still in the context of larger social networks.

The app’s main strength — and Ben’s main wisdom — is that it would allow the semi-private network to extend throughout all networks and platforms, not just Change.org. That’s 2.0 for you. Zuckerberg’s engineers may have built the best base platform, but its folks like Ben Rattray who are going to push social networking to the next level.

Stay tuned!