This is just a curious observation from over the past few months. I see a lot of theological tweets and central sermon idea tweets pop up at certain times throughout the week (mostly on Saturday nights) from preachers that I follow on Twitter. It’s interesting to see the general study habits of a large group of people by their preach tweets.

I find myself “preach tweeting” when I’m studying for a sermon as well. I just can’t help it! And if you’re Pentecostal like I am, you have to sprinkle some exclamation marks in there somewhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I think we should tag these sometimes awkward, sometimes context-lacking, sometimes off-the-wall and sometimes powerful 140 character sermons #preachtweets.

I’ve created a fun little chart to illustrate my observation. Disclaimer: By no means is this reliable empirical data.

Facebook has 400 million users. That’s almost 6% of the entire global population. Facebook’s founder has made it clear at the latest developer conference, that Facebook aims to take over the entire Internet. They want to be the central hub where websites come to get users/traffic.  Facebook is bigger than the United States population. I can’t think of any other online business that has this much power over the personal information of 6% of the global population.

There has been a lot of concern in recent days with Facebook’s privacy practices. Recently the Wall Street Journal exposed how Facebook and Twitter send your user information when you click on any external link. This violates Facebook’s own privacy agreement.

Basically, information called a referrer is sent to the site you visit after clicking on a link or ad from Facebook or Twitter. Within that referrer is a reference to your profile screen name or number. This information is collected by analytics trackers such as Google Analytics.

No longer are you an anonymous user, but with this information they have your public profile information at their finger tips. This has huge implications if you come across an unscrupulous site. If your Facebook privacy settings are not locked down, an advertiser can find your full name (sometimes your hyphenated maiden name) and even your address on your PUBLIC profile.

Facebook has launched a new program as well that gives certain websites your information so they can customize their site just for you. You may not know it but you are automatically opted into this program with the latest Facebook update. It’s only a pilot program for now, but in the future, your information could potentially be shared with thousands of sites across the net just by visiting.

Here are a few ways I came up with to protect yourself and your information:

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Facebook wants to become the central hub of the Internet. In more definitive terms, it wants to become the river, and all websites will become its tributaries. This potentially can expose users to privacy issues in the future. There are a lot of proponents and skeptics out there. This may be a huge turning point for the web to globalize the socialize. This is extremely innovative on Facebook’s part.

Here’s a great little podcast explaining what Facebooks Open Graph means to you: Future Tense Podcast.

Currently, you are relatively anonymous when viewing websites. It takes a court order to link your name to your IP. Your IP follows you wherever you go and a website owner can track you down to your region where your ISP is located. That’s why you get ads that target the city or county you live in. However, they do not know your name or your behavioral preferences. Facebook Open Graph could possibly place advertisers one step closer to your privacy bubble.

Your “Like This” choices will follow you across the net and be used in an algorithm to control what content you are served as well as what content your friends see at initial visit. This is reality today. As of now, the only way you can be tracked on the net is if you leave a comment on a site, and that is if you use your real name. Facebook wants you to use your “identity” when surfing the interwebs. This word “identity” scares me a bit because of the implications of privacy.

A lot of publishers are diving full force into Open Graph because Facebook has a 400 million user audience. This means if you are concerned about your privacy, you should be mindful about the implications of viewing a site integrated into Facebook. Do your research, and find out if you’re OK with the new changes at Facebook. I encourage everyone to drill down and check every privacy option on Facebook. After all, it is your “identity” you’re putting out there.

There is some confusion about the difference between Facebook pages and groups among a lot of youth pastors. If you’re looking to put your church or youth group on Facebook, you might want to consider the following points.

Pages

• Intended for organizations, companies, bands, brands, celebrities etc.
• A place to post updates, not good for interaction.
• Fans can view updates in their feed.
• Updates can be pushed to a Twitter account.
• Multiple admins, but updates are always from the page profile avatar, not personal avatars.
• Unlimited number of fans.
• Cannot mass email fans.
• No privacy settings.

Groups

• Created for interaction among members.
• Limit of 5,000 members.
• Can assign other admins, list officers, and block members.
• Mass email group members (under 5,000).
• Updates show personal avatars rather than the group avatar.
• Privacy settings – invite only, public, etc.
• Updates cannot be pushed to Twitter.
• Updates cannot be viewed in member’s feeds.

It is my opinion that churches who want to throw their social networking eggs into the Facebook basket should have both a page and a group. The group can be used to collect photos and have discussions about events and the page can be used for announcements and your Twitter account. Typically, discussions are very rare within a Facebook groups, however you can use discussions during youth events by creating a poll or something similar and driving members to use it. Groups are important if you want to get news out quickly via email to all of your members. With pages, a member might miss your update if they don’t check their account very often. I hope this helps you figure out your Facebook strategy!

For more in depth reading check out Mashable’s post on Pages vs. Groups.

This past year, our church launched our own social networking site.  I had a few critics as to why we need our “own” social network from the tech community when I first started talking about it.  A lot of people said to simply create a Facebook group.  My response was, “How many people actually go look at Facebook groups?”  From my experience, not many.  They sign up for a Facebook group and forget about it.   Plus, we needed a network that would give us more proximity.  With Facebook, there are hundreds of people we know around the world.  With our own network, we are able to quickly connect on issues relevant to just our Church.

It’s been really great getting people to create profiles, share their testimonies and post photos of church events.   We also use it to mass communicate with our members.   Many members have created their own small groups and have organized some really cool things on the network.  Most churches try to identify small group needs and invent small groups.  This social network is a great place for them to happen organically.  It definitely has been a tool to help people come together and get to know one another.

The tool we used to create our network is Ning.  For premium features like a custom domain and no ads, you need to pay a small monthly fee.  Ning has some cool features for sure, but if you’re looking for a free service, you should try Grou.ps.  I just stumbled across this awesome platform that is totally free.  It’s completely ad-free, and you can even map a custom domain for easy access and ownership.   If you already have a website, you can create a subdomain like:  http://community.mychurch.com and map it for free to your Grou.ps network.  Here are some of the cool features from Grou.ps.

Use your own branding.  Grou.ps doesn’t bug you with their logo.

Unlimited media uploads.

Free domain masking – (Ning charges almost $10.00/month for this feature!)

Integrate popular social sites to bring your members back!

Forum and mailing lists.

Personal blogs.

Real-time chat.

User sub-groups: Members can organize their own small groups!

Crowd Sourcing Wikis: Share documents and collaborate.

Calendaring.

Share files.

Share links.

Map important locations.

Customizable member profiles.

For those more technically inclined, you can even host Grou.ps on your own server because it’s open source!  You can customize it and add your own functionality to it.  Also, Grou.ps comes in over 35 languages, so if your user base needs localization, it’s already built in.

Grou.ps is completely free for the taking.  Start a social network for your church or youth group today!

Here’s a quick look at the admin panel:

Go to Grou.ps

[invite]

Sprout has just announced that it no longer is providing a free service.  You can see their pricing on their website.

Sprout Builder is a great tool that helps you easily build flash banners and widgets for your site.  It’s free and you can build all kinds of cool things that interact with social platforms.  This is a great idea to build MySpace banners for youth events that young people can embed on their sites.  I created a quick widget with my Twitter feed and my personal blog RSS to show you how it works!