You may have noticed some Facebook users showing up in your church's page... you can spot them and tell them apart by the little "F" icons in the lower right corner of their thumbnail pictures.
Clicking on their thumbnails will take you to their Facebook profiles, where you can add them as Facebook friends. Of course, you can also invite them to join MyChurch so you can be friends here as well.
But this is part of an intentional and ongoing effort on our part to let Facebook users participate in their online church communities at MyChurch while staying on Facebook.com. Some prefer Facebook over MyChurch, and we want to empower them to "be church" wherever they hang out online.
We'll provide more updates and heads-up on our Facebook integration over the next few weeks (there's a lot more coming!).
Question for our blog readers: does anyone NOT have an account on Facebook yet? If so, what are some of the reasons you don't want to join Facebook?
We’ve been doing a redesign of your Home page and we’re set to release it early next week.The changes should streamline the feed more and help highlight relevant content from your community (friends and church).Here are some things you can expect in this revision:
Blogs See the latest posts from blogs you are following (lower right).Many of you gave us feedback that it was hard to find the actual blogs posted amongst all the comments and activity of your friends.So now there’s a special place designated just for blogs are you are following.
Filter Feed by Type
To help drill down to a specific type of activity, you can now select a filter for your feed.See only prayer requests, announcements, or blogs, etc.
Publisher
In the last couple weeks we have introduced a simple way to share prayer requests.Prayer requests are done through what we call the “Publisher”.This week we’ll be adding a way to do a Classifieds post from the publisher.And in future revisions, there will be more simple features added to the Publisher making it the go-to place for adding content.
Classifieds
Previously called sharing, we are making it super easy to post a need or offer something to your church community.Just click on the ‘Classifieds post’ icon on the Publisher.Reflective of the church of Acts, we believe that real community happens when needs are met both spiritually and practically.
Memos Gone, Online Now Stays Not shown in the mockup are the Memos and Online Now.Memos will be removed, but Online Now will stay in the lower right column.
We just released a new feature where you can now post and view almost any type of document to your church media library.
Powerpoint slides, PDF's, Word docs, even Excel spreadsheets can all be uploaded. We teamed up with Scribd.com to use their iPaper technology to display these documents in a flash player (think Youtube for documents)
So reading docs no longer requires you to download an actual file. Here's an example of a document that a church just uploaded through our new system
Of course you can still download the actual document too (but its so easy to just read the document without having to save and open it!)
As you may have noticed, we've been making lots of changes recently. And more changes are on the way. We'll be enhancing and adding to features, and we'll also remove a couple features that aren't being used.
There's a good reason for all these changes which we'll share about soon. (hint: we've been meeting with a lot of folks from Facebook and other internet companies recently). In the meantime, could you think about which of these features you or your church can live without?
- Church events - Friends' status updates (integrated w/ Twitter) - Testimonials ("what I love about this church") - Church groups
What we want to know is... if we removed one of the above, which feature could you live without?
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 :)
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