Related to my questions from last week, between Posterous vs Tumblr, Lifehack.org has shared an interested idea for the micro-blogging site Posterous.
(BTW – Mashable picked Tumblr over Posterous but a survey of their readers showed a preference of Tumblr over Posterous)
Found some more info on Mars Hill’s social network, The City:
The site is being built around physical communities not as much as around online communities.
One of the design principles of The City, which has guided virtually every decision we’ve made, is that the physical is more important than the virtual. This subtle but significant difference provides the foundation for understanding how this new thing is going to work…
On my Facebook page, I’ve got dozens of friends. Of those friends, I would imagine that about one third are actually in the Seattle area. The other two thirds are people literally all over the world. While there is a certain cool factor in having a virtual Rolodex of everyone I’ve ever known, is there anything more to it than that? Sure, if I’m planning a trip out to one of the areas where they will be, it’s rather convenient, and I get to find out that my college friend is eating a ham sandwich (a la Twitter), but that doesn’t change my life or their life for that matter. When you’re trying to build an intentional community, Facebook just doesn’t cut it. There are too many off topic, off mission sorts of diversions that the game aspect of the site dominates any mission it could try to carry.
Now, Facebook can be incredibly missional for the 1% that choose to use it as a mission field and network specifically with that in mind, but I’m trying to think along the lines of how you get the 80% to that level. The framework will either make a compelling community, or it will not. I don’t believe Facebook ever will do that for the 80%.
More specifically they’re building the site around physical neighborhoods.
Simply, your neighborhood is everyone that lives near you. Pretty basic eh? So why is this a cool concept? Let’s look at a concrete yet fictional example.
John is a community group leader in Ballard; he hosts his group just a little down the road from the public library off Market. He’s got a relatively new group with just five folks in regular attendance. He invites people to his group regularly, but they live all over the place! Ballard draws people from all over Seattle (and beyond), and finding the right people has been tough.
Jim is new to Mars Hill. He attended his first service, stopped by The City kiosk afterwards, and signed up to be “connectedâ€, whatever that means. The volunteer that helped him was nice enough, but Jim doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do next. He lives near the old firehouse on Market, in fact, he works as a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coach at the studio there. If only John knew Jim was in his backyard…
This is where the ‘neighborhood’ thing I checked into the code this morning comes into play. John would see in The City that a new guy showed up in his neighborhood (without having to dig for it), maybe The City would even say, “hey, you’re the closest community group!†and John could reach out to Jim with a couple of clicks.
Love it!
I’ve written about social networking (i.e. MySpace, Facebook, etc) here before. I’ve also written about the idea of churches getting behind these networks and putting them to use for marketing, announcements, building community, etc. etc.
I haven’t heard a lot of feedback other than on the techie side of things. I read recently about Mars Hill’s social networking strategy over at digital.leadnet.org.
Here’s an overview:
In addition to this, Dustin told digital.leadnet about an internal project they’re working on – “Our IT department is currently developing our own social network, the City, that will be used for almost all communication within the church.” More info on their soon-to-launch social network here.
This is very cool in my book (of course Mars Hill apparently has a full IT team and their own blog). They’re building the site on Ruby on Rails. Not real familiar with that software or “programing language” but it looks cool. I’m looking at doing something with Elgg.org for now. But I’m seeing more folks using Ruby on Rails. Might be worth looking into.
So the techies are interested in all this and implementing it – but for me part of the thrill of implementing a social network for encounter or other churches is the challenge aspect of it. I wonder how enthused average users or church members would be in using it.
So I put together a quick survey over on the encounter blog. I’ve plugged it via our Twitter feed, our Facebook group, a MySpace bulletin and of course here. I’d encourage you to take a second and fill out the form, regardless of if you’re an active part of encounter or not. And I’d love for you to push the survey on your own blogs as well. The more input the better.
And yes – you can remain anonymous in filling out the form.
Here’s some more Intranet/Social Networking info from across the pond:
Robin Farr, editor of the employee intranet for the provincial government of British Columbia, is humanizing the way it communicates with its employees.
She does this by continuing to transform the government’s intranet from the neglected, dull afterthought it was less than two years ago into a living Web where 30,000 employees can see themselves talking about their jobs, find ideas to make their work easier and more fun, shop for bargains, buy and sell personal items, send e-cards to colleagues for a job well done, and more.
Farr has done all this with a staff of three, including herself. She does most of the writing, and until recently did it all. She manages a videographer and one Web administrator.
The employee response is spectacular. The site averages 170,000 hits a month—a 2800 percent jump in traffic—among the 30,000 province employees.
How did she do it? In hindsight, it’s simple. Conversing with employees like ordinary people through video and even archived content.
Read the full story