Killing Church Programs – What the Church Can Learn from Apple and Google

In your latest update to Apple’s free program, iTunes, Ping is gone. It’s disappeared. What is Ping?, you ask. (Well, you should be asking, What was Ping?) Ping was an attempt by Apple to get into the social media game by allowing people to easily share what songs they were listening to, liking, etc.

You know how people are always using Spotify or Pandora to share with you on Facebook the song that they’re listening to at the moment? Well, Apple was hoping that since over 300 million people use iTunes, they could get a piece of the action.

But it didn’t work. Ping had a low adoption rate — at least by Apple’s standards — so they killed the program. They didn’t keep it going for the millions of people who used it. They didn’t apologize. They just euthanized it and moved on.

Three years ago, I wrote a post about Google Wave as a Sermon Preparation Tool, and that post was picked up the next year by WorkingPreacher.org. Within months, Google killed Wave.

Google Wave was an online, real-time collaboration tool. I liked it, a lot, and I used it. But not enough people did. When asked about the death of Google Wave, CEO Eric Schmidt said,

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Win a Load of Free Stuff!

One week from today, I’m headed to Sri Lanka with a coterie of fellow bloggers. We’re being hosted by World Vision, and they’ll be showing us some of the development work in that country.

To celebrate this coming journey, we’re having a little contest/giveaway. We’ve put together four identical prize packages, a collection of some of our favorite books, music, and World Vision apparel. To each of those four prize packs we will add something from Sri Lanka, a unique prize made by the people of Sri Lanka.

This is what each of the four winners will receive:

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Fight Back Against Facebook

Dear Readers Who Use Facebook (AKA, Dear All Readers),

Facebook highly encouraged all of us who have some kind of public following to switch from a Profile (aka, Timeline), to a Page. In fact, capping the friend limit at 5,000 made it virtually required.

So I migrated my Profile to a Page, and I’ve encouraged numerous other authors to do the same (Jay Bakker, Phyllis Tickle, Andrew Marin, Nadia Bolz-Weber). We lost all of our Facebook history — every update, comments, and image. But that’s no biggie, because now we can communicate with even more people.

But then Facebook did what it does: changed the rules in order to make more money. Now, if you’ve liked my page, there’s only about a one-in-five chance that you’ll see any of my posts. Look at what it shows me, as an admin, at the bottom of each post:

Why the notice? Because Facebook wants me to PAY CASH MONEY to get my posts to show up in the newsfeed of the users who’ve like the page. In other words, you’ve like the page, but Facebook is keeping the updates from you.

However, there is a way to fight back! [Read more...]

Help Us Name the Album

Peter Rollins, Jay Bakker and I spent the weekend at Pete’s studio in Connecticut cutting an album.  Then we went to Brooklyn, where Courtney Perry shot the album cover.  There’s a bit of a contest on Facebook where people are trying to name our album:

 

Elizabeth Drescher: Facebook Doesn't Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches

Elizabeth Drescher has a great post at Religion Dispatches, riffing on Richard Beck’s excellent post about Facebook killing the church.  Money Quote from Drescher:

Not Enough Social to Go Around

The relationships among the undergraduates in Beck’s research were not formed on Facebook, they were enriched by students’ continued digital contact. The problem with regard to churches and other religious communities (and we see this over and over again with Facebook group pages whose only visitors are the minister and the technophile parishioner who championed the church’s foray into the digital domain) seems to be that there’s not enough social to go around.

That is, if church were, indeed, a robustly social experience, Facebook would enrich and extend that experience, enhancing week-to-week retention through ongoing conversation with valued friends—just as it appears to do with undergraduates moving from the first to the second year of college. Thin connections in face-to-face settings are not magically transformed by technology.

via Facebook Doesn’t Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches | (A)theologies | Religion Dispatches.

In fact, this very point was made by Mike Baughman at the Social Phonics Boot Camp last week in Dallas, when he challenged the group about how Facebook is actually picking up where the church dropped the ball.

Facebook Mail

I hate, hate, hate Facebook mail.  You can’t archive old messages, so you must either delete an old message or keep it in the in-box.  And, worse, you cannot turn it off.  I don’t want emails via Facebook.  That’s why I make my email address public in my profile.

Honestly, I care little about all the consternation over FB privacy.  But I sure wish they’d allow us to turn off the mail function.

Glad I got that off my chest.  Now back to regular programming.

Obamacall

Tonight I’ll be on a conference call with some other religious leaders (I know, I know, I hardly qualify) to talk with the Obama campaign about their outreach to religious folks. If you wanna tell me what to say, you cannot comment here. Instead, you’ve got to comment on my Facebook status or drop me a Tweet.

And Jesus sayeth unto them…

…”If you love me, join my GROUP.”