I’m Curious: Social Networks

I’d like to take a quick informal survey.
I’m curious…how many online social networks have you joined?  Which ones?  Do you keep your profile update in all of them?

Thanks for your help.

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What’s all this hype about Facebook? (Part 1)

If you don’t care about online trends or what technology tools are engaging people, then you can skip this post (actually you can probably skip most of my posts :) ).

For the rest of you, if you aren’t paying attention to the online phenomenon of Facebook, you should be. I mentioned it earlier last week in conjunction with LinkedIn, but decided Facebook’s Internet presence is well deserving of a post (or more) of its own.

For millions of students, Facebook is old news. It originated as a school-only social network, but has stepped way out beyond that in the last year. It now has over 30 million users, with over half of those users joining in the past 6 months. Several students I know actually refer to Facebook as THE Internet…meaning, it is the only Internet destination that they visit. Along with zillions of other media stories, it was recently featured on the Today Show as a part of a segment on research involving the younger generation and social networking, its creator Mark Zuckerberg only being 23 years old himself.

So what is Facebook all about? To fully understand, it’s something you’ll have to join and experience (even after which, some of you may still not get..but that’s ok!) If you’re not on Facebook, I’d love to help get you started with this series of posts to guide you through it.

First, let’s be friends…Simply go to Facebook.com and sign up. Once you have confirmed your registration and filled out your profile information, type in my name, “Bobby Gruenewald”, in the search field on the left hand side of the screen. You’ll see a page come up listing people with names that are similar to mine, click on the “Add to Friends” option next to my name and photo. Once I’ve confirmed the relationship, you’ll be able to browse through my friends, join groups, and see what I’ve been up to.

For those of you that want a quick summary before signing-up…Facebook is a web platform that is:

• Highly Social - It’s easy to connect with old friends or acquaintances and make new friends.
• Highly Viral - Almost every part of Facebook is easy to share with your entire network of relationships.
• Highly Extensible - Add applications for movies, music, travel…the list is truly endless because you can build your own.

Now, I look forward to seeing you there!

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Second Life and Multiverse

Most all of you probably know we have a virtual campus in the 3-D world of Second Life. I won’t revisit all of the reasons why we began this effort (you can read about it here or here). We’ve already had a number of stories about people who have become followers of Christ through this virtual campus. We also have recently had people visiting our physical campuses who first attended LifeChurch.tv in Second Life. In fact, some readers of this blog are only here because I met them in SL.

All of that is exactly what we hoped would happen…BUT, it has not come without challenges. The most significant challenge has been the reliability of the Second Life platform. We have had multiple experiences where our island has crashed under the stress and load of people attending. Unlike all of our other web applications, we have pretty much no control over the actual server that runs our island, nor do we have the ability to seamlessly throw more servers at the problem. We simply have to hope that Second Life improves their infrastructure over time. Because we are seeing changed lives…we will of course press on.

The good news is that Second Life is just one of a growing number of companies building 3-D virtual worlds (aka metaverses). One company that I’ve been following takes a different approach than Second Life and appears to be picking up steam…Multiverse is a platform for developers to build their own “Second Life”-type of virtual world or multi-player game. They give you the client software, and the server software runs on your own servers (I like that). You only pay them money if you decide to charge users (and their cut is only 10%). This means that it’s basically free for most of our uses.

Now…I am not interested in building private 3-D “club houses” for Christians since I am focused on using these tools to reach people who are not followers of Christ. I do, however, think there are ways to use a platform like this to build 3-D environments (even games) that can engage people who would never step foot in a church otherwise.

Our digerati team currently has a very full plate…if some of you are seriously interested in developing in this environment, I would love to hear from you.

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Networking Online

I’ve been asked several times what social networking tools I use.

I have actually set up accounts with nearly every social networking site. I like to evaluate whether the church should consider having a presence. However, I’m currently actively using only two: Facebook and LinkedIn:

Facebook is very popular and easy to use, and it’s been great for reconnecting with old friends from high school and college. I also love how extensible it is—people have developed a lot of apps for it.

LinkedIn is more of a professional (business) networking tool… It sort of plays off of the “six degrees of separation” concept. I have over 6600 “friends of my friends” (2 degrees of separation), and nearly 1 million people that I am connected to within just 3 degrees of separation.

If you’re a Facebook user, you can view my profile here. If you’re not yet, you should sign up, search for my name and add me as a friend… You really should get to understand what all the hype is about.

You can also view my LinkedIn profile. I’d love to connect with you and introduce you to people in my network. Once you sign up, you can request to add me to your network by using my email address (bobby@lifechurch.tv). One side note: You don’t need to have a paid account to use the service.

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