Church Online

Many of us read and subscribe to blogs, have friends on Facebook, Email, and then there is Twitter – and it can feel like we are always switching between them to keep up. There are several different ways to keep track of these conversations using third party applications. With Twitter and Facebook a couple of the best are Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck. They allow you to organize friends and information from the two services so you can respond and not miss as much versus if you were always trying to go back and forth between the two sites.

For me, being a lot bit of a nerd and having used a lot of these applications, I have found I like the options of a Mac only application called Eventbox. Now, even though it is Mac only there are some things in the video below that are good to be aware of:

1. Almost any search you do on the Internet now you can actually subscribe to using RSS. What this means is that as new results for a search appears, it will be updated in the reader that organizes your RSS subscriptions.
2. Twitter, Google Blog Search, and Digg are just a few places that you can do real time searches for the remarks or posts that people are making.
3. Being able to connect to real time searches means you can search for things like “pray for” and find people all across Twitter who need prayer for something – and we can then respond in prayer with appropriate timing.

I know there is a lot of information in this post, and the rabbit hole of what is possible in building relationships and connecting to people at their point of need is very deep. That is why at Church Online we are going to start to see more posts like this that will help us all become more familiar with the tools. That familiarity will let us save time in the “gathering” so we can do better at ministering and loving people in relationships through online tools.