Tech Geek

No, you're not caught in some sort of a Groundhog Day time-warp. I have decided that over the summer, and while my colleague here at Northridge is on sabbatical, I'm going to take a little bit of a break and only write a TGIF every other week. I know that many of you will not be reading every week anyways, as you juggle camp, VBS, trips, and vacation time. So you'll get two shots to read a post. I am also looking for ideas of topics or questions that you would like me to cover. Drop me a line!

In the last TGIF I talked about Facebook. I also revealed that I have not been keeping up with our church's magazine, The Lutheran, as well as I could be. They had an article discussing Facebook and its use in campus ministry which you can find at this link. I appreciate the struggles that the article raises. Facebook can both be a boon to and a bane of face-to-face relationships that you want to nurture in ministry. As the article points out, Facebook, and other social networking websites, can also reveal things about our youth that we aren't sure we want to know. I appreciated the quote in the article from Jaime Bouzard, campus pastor of Texas State University, San Marcos, who said, “Sometimes I learn more about my students than I might wish, but ignorance is not bliss if I am to truly meet them in their reality.”

As youth workers, I think we need to spend some time thinking about how we live our online lives. There have been numerous stories of public officials, teachers, and others who have lost their jobs because of how they have represented themselves online. We, too, need to remember that we are showing who we are in the items that we display on our blogs and Facebook pages. While I don't think that linking to a political video on my blog is the same as saying something from the pulpit, it may impact how others receive my preaching.

So, first off, no pictures from late nights at the Extravaganza should ever be posted online. These are far too incriminating to too many people who enjoy the opportunity to let their hair down a bit. If you wouldn't pass the pictures around on Sunday morning, you probably shouldn't post them to your profile. Remember, the audience is unfiltered, so even if the majority of folks in your congregation wouldn't be surprised or offended, someone else might be.

At the same time, I think it is okay to be yourself. As those of you who know me personally know, I enjoy beer. So my Facebook profile includes a couple of virtual beers that I have received as gifts from friends, including Sin Boldly Lager from Old Lutheran. It also includes an application that I can update to show my favorite beer of the moment and of all time. I, as do many Lutherans, feel it is fine to engage in responsible adult drinking and I think it is fine for my youth and their families to know that I enjoy beer.

As I was pondering this post, I came across a number of sites that suggested only adding youth to your friend lists after they invited you. That's not a bad idea, and I will probably adopt it in the future. I also think it is okay to start conversations with the young people for who we care around issues of how they are representing themselves online. Is that how they want people to think of them?

I think I remember that one of our synods has some guidelines for Facebook usage among their youth ministers. Do any of you have policy guidelines in your congregation? E-mail them to me and I'll add them to the end of this post on the ELCA Youth Ministry Network website.

Here's a link to a blog post about how one pastor and his wife are using Facebook in life and ministry.

I received numerous invitations to join, but still I stayed away. Finally, I received yet another invitation and it was from a friend my own age, so I got on the bandwagon. A few days later, she chided me because I had over 50 friends and now the number has kept increasing. I'm talking about Facebook, the social networking site that connects over eighty-million users to one another. Are you one of them?

As soon as I joined Facebook, I was friended by lots of people that I knew in the real world. As my network grew, I saw more and more people that I knew and we 'friended' each other. I have been able to re-establish contact with some friends that I'd lost touch with and share mundane parts of my daily life with plenty of people who don't care!

I've also discovered it is one of the tools that can be useful in ministry. I see status updates from the youth in my group and know when they are having a rough day. I have some who tell me that they don't use old fashioned e-mail, just send them a message on Facebook. I have joined groups for members of the ELCA Youth Ministry Network and am creating a group to help those of us in the Montana Synod stay connected to one another.

Facebook allows you to create groups, so I have created a group for our high school youth group. This gives me yet another place to publicize events and send messages from. I can also share pictures within facebook and the youth in my group will tag them with names of other facebook users. I think that every photo I had uploaded was tagged within 2 hours of my having uploading them!

There are countless applications that are a part of facebook, some of which are useful, some of which are silly, and some of which will cause you to waste much of your precious time. I'm not going to recommend any particular applications, but I do recommend that you check out what you are giving away when you install one of them. There have been some privacy concerns associated with specific Facebook applications and also with Facebook in general after they tied purchasing information to specific accounts and displayed that in the feed.

I do use the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox, which pops up status change updates whenever I'm online and one of my friends changes their status. It can be a little distracting when I'm working on a sermon, but it's nice to know what's going on in the lives of my friends.

If you're already on Facebook, keep figuring out new ways to use it. If you're not, think about it the next time you get one of those e-mails inviting you to join. Chances are, you'll be surprised by how many people who know who are already using it.

Here are two other articles I stumbled upon which connect Facebook to youth ministry:

• http://www.youthworker.com/resources/ministry/11553171/
• http://ministrytools.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/using-facebook-in-youth-ministry/

A quick update to last week's post. If you wondered (or are still wondering) what Twitter is, check out the short film at http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter . The Common Craft folks have done an excellent job of explaining what Twitter is and why you might want to use it. They have some other great videos there as well!

This week I want to take a look at badges that you put on your blog or website to show your online status or latest status updates. I don't have much of a blog myself, but I'm going to point you to it so that you can see what I'm talking about. Visit http://pastorandy.blogspot.com/ and look at the right column which updates dynamically depending on what I'm doing online.

At the top of the column, underneath my profile, you see my Facebook Profile Badge. This is a small bit of HTML that I pasted into a section on my blogger page. To get your own, visit http://www.facebook.com/badges.php while you're logged into Facebook. There you create your badge and get the HTML that you will paste onto your site. There are options for vertical and horizontal badges displaying as much or as little information as you wish. It's all updated to reflect your latest Facebook status.

Next you'll see the Twitter Updates section. I have this set to display my last five Twitter updates, which are also my last five Facebook status messages. To get this one, I visited http://twitter.com/badges/ and clicked the appropriate links to get a badge for Blogger.

The Online Status section contains my Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk badges. They're all clumped together because I was tired of adding individual sections!

The Skype one comes from http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/buttons/ where you enter your Skype username and choose a button type to get the HTML code. I like the one that shows my online status to blog visitors.

The Yahoo Messenger one comes from http://messenger.yahoo.com/addpresence.php where you put in your Yahoo ID to get the HTML code.

Finally, the Google Talk one comes from visiting http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New while logged into Google. You get the HTML code and paste it in.

I haven't had too much of a problem with extra SPIM or SPAM from these badges, but if you're nervous about putting your Skype username, Yahoo ID, or Google ID out on the web, you might not want to use these features.

This week I received the following question: Have you figured out how to have Twitter actually change the status on a Facebook page? Yes, I have. That was an easy one to answer. I suppose the questioner wanted a bit more information than that. I use a combination of Google Talk (Instant Messaging ), Jott, Twitter, and Facebook to keep my friends and youth updated.

The first key is getting your status updates into Twitter. There are a myriad of to do this. There are at least these methods:

• from and SMS message on your phone
• from IM
  
• from your logged-in home page (on Twitter)
  
• from m.twitter.com (via your phone)
• from Jott (via your phone)
  
• from a large number of third party applications at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps - be warned, there are a lot of them!

Once you've got your updates to Twitter, you need a way to synchronize them to Facebook (and other places). The application that I've been using successfully to do this for the past few months is called TwitterSync. Once you update your Tweet, it magically updates your Facebook status in a minute or so. You can use any verb you want, not just "is" and you can even keep your Tweets password-protected if you don't want the general public to follow you. It automatically filters out side chatter (@ messages on Twitter) and you can also set it to filter out and exclude Tweets that have certain words in them.

In order to set it up, visit http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6009973148&ref=s and follow the instructions there. Basically, you need to add the application to your Facebook account and also set up your Twitter account to have cnySrettiwT follow you. Once you do this, it seems to work pretty reliably, but some users have noticed times it doesn't update.

I'll also remind you again of Jott as a great service for those of us who don't have the SMS typing skills down as well as most of our kids. Once you sign up for an account, you can send messages to a wide variety of web services. Jott transcribes the voice message into a text message and send it on. You can send Tweets, add Google Calendar appointments, add Remember the Milk tasks, and a whole bunch of other things too.

Next week I'll spend some time on how to put your Facebook Status, and other messenger status, on your blog or webpage.