Since I’ve been linking distinctively Christian social networking sites perhaps it would be good to show you a few discussions. The first I’ll mention is a blog entry from the interestingly-named site, “Church Marketing Sucks.” I really liked this entry because I thought I was the victim of confusion. I couldn’t figure out is web 2.0 applied to social networking or to application services that are remote (i.e. not a program on your hard drive, but one you can use through the interent). Well, I was confused because the term is confused. It seems to mean both:

For my purposes, web 2.0 refers to the kinds of sites that build on community or offer a service. Rather than simply offering static information, web 2.0 sites offer interaction.

See? The interaction can be between people or users and programs.

Let me just break in at this point (I want to talk about social networking, of course) and list a few of my own current favorites. First, some background for those who don’t know: I have two computers a laptop, and a desktop, which I use about equally. Both are normally connected to the internet by broadband. What this means is that I used to have a continual headache trying to synchronize them with email and calendar etc. My first and primary reason for searching for web applications was to eliminate the need to worry about this. So…

• Gmail — this is an outstanding service. It even allows free POP3 integration if you want to use your own email client. I guess I should experiment with that feature in order to download email when I know I won’t have a web connection. But the interface through a browser is quite good. (If you won a Mac, then I would recommend Firefox rather than Safari, unless there have been some updates since I switched browsers.)
• Google Reader — This is still officially “in the lab” but it works quite well. This is a case where a function wasn’t working for me on my browsers and using it on the web was a great help. I tried to use the “live bookmark” feature on firefox (version 1) and had so many feeds it seemed to be making the browser useless for the first five minutes after starting it. (Anyone else have this problem?) Switching to the reader made life much less frustrating. There are other readers out there. I couldn’t tell you which one is best because I didn’t feel any great need to move from google’s. I’m just a pawn of the evil empire…, unless that is WalMart… Or is it Microsoft? I get so confused!
• 30 boxes — a calendar program designed by a fan of Getting Things Done. I suppose there are other good calendars out there, like google’s, but I get superstitious about Google knowing every thing it is possible to know about me (yeah, like they have time to worry about such trivialities) so I diversified. 30 boxes also gives you a todo list as well as a place for shortcuts on an imitation Mac OSX destktop screen in your browser.
• Tasktoy — another GTD-inspired site is my current start page. It allows you to send reminders to yourself of your tasks, and it allows you to put in your most important links.
• Zexer address book — I can’t check my gmail address book while composing, so I’ve begun using this site so I can have important addresses available in a window.
• Google Notebook — I find this easy to use and much more easy to track than, say, using textfiles on my computer. And it is instantly available to any computer I use!
• Calculator.com — I, frankly, hate using my mac dashboard. It paralyzes my computer for at least a couple of minutes. So reaching my calculator presents a challenge. It is usually a lot easier and faster to go to this website.
• Time-tracker — This is an indispensable tool for me now that I’ve found it. You can track days or projects as you wish (and you can do both simultaneously if you want). You don’t have to stay on the site for the timer to work.

I have a few more, but this digression is already too long. In any case, after offering his own examples (which involve more social networking than I just offered) “chief blogger” Kevin Hendricks writes:

The church is essentially a community, so the ideals of web 2.0 thinking fit nicely in the context of the church.

He’s absolutely right. Connect Our People has more of a congregation focus than the others that are springing up (as far as I can tell at the moment), which I think is good when the goal is building congregational or denominational community. But the point remains true.

Also this:

Do you see where this is going? Suddenly you don’t have an overworked communications team doing all the updates. You have youth group members maintaining an online events calendar. You have a Sunday School teacher posting lesson notes on a blog and the learning suddenly happens outside of the classroom. You have older members of the congregation sharing their wisdom with younger members. You have people sharing and people connecting. Suddenly it’s not the pastor trying to do everything.

There are some links to follow that are well worth reading, with discrimination. I’m not all that happy with the strong anti-hierarchical message that seems to come out in some 2.0 discussion. It makes me glad that ConnectOurPeople is aimed at churches rather than individuals (though it certianly provides networking for those individuals).

However, it is still pretty interesting to see what sorts of tools are becoming available in response to real needs.