We released a new feature today to let you post prayer requests. Your prayers appear on your profile, on the Explore page, and on your church's community tab.
Your friends' prayer requests automatically show up on your homepage feed. But feel free to pray for others who aren't your friends, especially other members of your local church.
6:18 Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints,
We also gave the church Community Tab a facelift. It's now filterable by Prayer requests, Sharing posts, and Announcements - all things that are posted by your local community, for your local community.
We're phasing out the church blog from the Community tab. While your church blog will still exist (mychurch.org/churchname/blog), church members will no longer be able to write to it. This feature was used by less than 1% of the churches. And it didn't really fit into the "by the community, for the community" theme as the Prayers, Classifieds, and Announcements features. If you were one of the few churches that used the group blog, feel free to use Announcements which has nearly identical functionality. Or you can link to your pastor's blog (or whoever was contributing to the group blog) from your church's About section.
But we did bring back a couple other features. Seeing which of your friends are online now. And subscribing (aka following) to someone's blog. Both these features were highly missed, especially "Online now." And even blog subscriptions gets asked about regularly even though it was removed more than a year ago!
Thanks to all the folks who wrote in voicing their inputs... Sue got an earful :)
You can now sync your status on MyChurch with your latest Twitter post. Just go to your feed settings and add in your Twitter account.
You can also automatically post the titles of any blogs you write on MyChurch over to your Twitter. If you choose to do so, the number of readers you have on your blog just went up. Your new blog reader count includes your Twitter followers...
The MyChurch team also started a Twitter profile here if you want to follow us.
Can Twitter be used as a ministry tool? If none of this stuff makes sense, here's an introduction to what Twitter is about:
Today we took the step of removing ads from many of the pages here on MyChurch. We did this for a couple reasons:
It's your blog, your photo album, your profile, your homepage. We were always reluctant to put ads on your personal space. We think your pages look a lot cleaner now.
We were getting lots of complaints about some of the ads we were showing. We don't have tight control over ads. We show whatever the various ad networks give us, and that causes problems that technology cannot solve.
Thanks to the many wonderful folks in the MyChurch community who have diligently reported ads to us in the past. Your help was greatly appreciated. And the volume and consistency of your reports convinced us that we need to make the site as ad-free as possible.
Most church pages still have ads, but we also reduced that quantity as well. And since churches keep a diligent eye on their own pages, any bad ads will be contained to just a few eyeballs. Of course, a church can always get rid of all ads on their pages by upgrading :)
If you're reading this, it probably means you're one of the first 250,000 members at MyChurch.org. Which probably means you've already setup a "Vanity URL" (ex mychurch.org/yourname)
If you haven't set up a personalized URL, you'll still have a chance to do so. Until next week, that is. We're deprecating this feature for new/future members. Church pages will always be able to personalize their MyChurch URL. But we don't think it makes sense to continue this customization for individual users.
If you've already set one up, you'll still get to keep it and use it. But future members of MyChurch won't have this privilege. (there are perks for being an early adopter!)
A lot of new MyChurch users are coming from Facebook. We expect that to grow as we integrate more into Facebook and roll out a way for Facebook users to log into MyChurch * As we've gotten feedback from these Facebook users through interviews and surveys, we learned that individual customization isn't as important as being able to personalize and promote their church pages.
* we'll make an official announcement in a couple weeks, but you can actually start using MyChurch.org with your Facebook.com account. The technology is called Facebook Connect, and you can send any feedback on it to joe@mychurch.org :)
Adding videos to your church media page has never been easier. We now allow churches to post an unlimited number of videos, thanks to our friends at Youtube.
You can post videos to your church media page by simply pasting the video's Youtube URL. Or by uploading the video directly from your computer to your church's page:
Your church media page will take any video formats that Youtube can take - even video from your cell phone (.3GP). Any uploaded videos get hosted and streamed by Youtube. So you get the added benefit of exposure to the Youtube audience.
There's currently a 10-minute limit to the video length (just like on Youtube.com). But no limit to the number of videos for your church. Church videos get posted like a blog - meaning they're open to stars and comments from the MyChurch community. And they get posted on the Explore tab for videos.
One of our inspirations for allowing for unlimited church videos was this cool video post. This blog post got 5 million views, 600 stars, and 260 comments. But the really cool thing was that its popularity within the Christian community on MyChurch pushed it to popularity on Youtube.
It won 9 honors from Youtube, was featured on the Youtube Most Popular page, and Favorited by 19,000 Youtube users. How amazing that a church performance meant to be seen by a few hundred people ballooned into something seen by millions...
We want to empower churches to share their message. Whether its a Sunday sermon, a member's testimonial, an innovative skit, or an inspiring song... they can all be shared by video. And there's no cost and unlimited space to do so...
(ps Moderators of churches - your video settings are defaulted to let any verified member of your church post or upload a video to your media page. You can set that to require your approval before posting if you prefer)
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