Twitter and the Church

Jeff Wilson over at imageForth.com has some feedback on his experience using Twitter to stay connected with his church. While he points out several advantages, there is one big disadvantage that can be difficult to overcome:

Twitter is a great way to keep those who “twitter” informed, but one of the problems that we have encountered is that there are not very many who use Twitter.  So, a question comes to mind how do you inform both those that do have a Twitter account and those that don’t that Henderson Hills has a Twitter account?

I will be curious to see how many (if any) of Grace Church's friends and members start following the church on Twitter.

Read more: ImageForth » Twitter and the Church

Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts

I have been an active twitter user for several months, and now I’ve branched into a second twitter account. I’ve created an account for my church, Grace Church, with the idea of pushing simple information about what’s happening at Grace. It’s an experiment in using twitter for this kind of application.

The problem is that twitter is not setup for multiple accounts. To post to twitter, you have to be logged in. To post as a different user, you have to log out and log in as the new user.

Given that twitter is best when you can tweet when the thought hits you, this is rather cumbersome. Here’s where google comes to the rescue. Did a quick search on “managing multiple twitter accounts,” and I suddenly found a lot of options. This video by Churchscmo.com on YouTube offers a simple method using NetVibes page. Take a look:

As you can see below, I’ve not got my own NetVibes page setup with both of my twitter accounts online and ready to update. Pretty slick.

There are other options available, but this is a simple setup and it has the added benefit of providing several nice features available via NetVibes.

Highly recommended!

New Social Network Launched

After quite a few days of tweaking, I have officially launched my first social network using Ning. This is a social network for users of Logos Bible Software, the primary software I use for Bible study, teaching preparation, research, and anything else to do with biblical studies.

I have been a Logos user for 10 or 12 years. My first install of Logos came on floppy disks (a lot of floppy disks)! In the years that followed, I have continued to add to my electronic library to the point that I seldom crack open a paper commentary, Bible dictionary, etc. In fact, I have started donating a lot of my duplicate paper books (books that are in both my analog library and digital library) to our church library.

This will be a test project for me. I am interested to see how long it takes to begin to see a community develop. I am interested to see if the users of this social network contribute content that goes beyond simple back-and-forth communication. For example, will users begin contributing their own works created with Personal Book Builder, a tool Logos developed giving Logos users the ability to create content from any word or html document.

If you are a Logos user, please stop by the network and join us. If you are not a Logos user and are interested in Bible study, you should consider becoming a Logos user. If you are a student of social networking, I will continue to update you on the progress of this network and the lessons I am learning from its development.

You can find the network at http://libronix.ning.com/.

Google Enters Virtual World

PCMag.com is offering a preview/review of Google Lively (Beta). This is the online giant's entrance into the virtual world dominated by Second Life. Here is the summary of the article:

Lively gives you a 3D chat world with a very clear interface, and it makes getting into virtual worlds much easier than it is with Second Life or World of Warcraft, which both use far more sophisticated 3D rendering for much larger, more realistic worlds (and consequently require far more PC horsepower). Lively gives you nowhere near as rich an experience, but it's a decent way to test the waters. Because of the lack of depth and realistic physics, however, I can't really see Lively, in its current form, becoming a serious challenger to Second Life. It seems more of a phenomenon people will check out just once or twice before they move on.

Here is a video preview from YouTube:

Just when it was getting fun...

Are we losing our enthusiasm for blogging? Just when it starts to get fun, there's a suggestion that blogging is entering into its sunset. Rob Peters suggests that blogging may be losing ground to microblogging. He states,

Blogging malaise might be due to the myriad of options now available to the traditional pleasure blogger. A yen for self-expression can be fulfilled online in any number of ways -- social networking, participatory news reporting, Flickring, YouTubing -- you name it. The blog has stiff competition.

Even so, there does appear to be a more realistic version of the blog coming down the fibre optic trunk line. If filling an entire blank page is a little daunting, how does a 200-character text box sound? Enter the microblog.

The move from big blogs to smaller ones says a lot about our cultural attention span. One or two lines of text are about as much writing as we can handle -- either creating or consuming it. Which begs the question, why did I write a bloated 750-word blog exposé? I could have just Twittered it in a line or two.

I think blogging will continue to have a place in our technology toolbox for some time, but as it loses its "coolness," I can see casual bloggers moving on to the next techno-fad to hit the streets. Moreover, as we become more and more mobile with out technology, microblogging will grow in importance.

You can read Peters' complete article, "Is Personal Blogging Fast-Fading?" by clicking here.