Last year we started designing our "MyCentral" portal (see blog entry) but stopped when received word that CCV's Solomon framework was being bought by a company and would soon be a purchasable product called Arena ChMS.  At the time it seemed like we were on the right track, but now I think it is time to reevaluate some of our goals for the system.

Until recently, I was fairly unmoved by the social networking sites (Classmates, MySpace, Facebook, etc).  Without much intimate knowledge of them, I honestly thought they were overrated and of no worthy value. I figured they were mostly for people trying to reconnect with old, long lost classmates.  Then my wife and her co-workers (who work all over the country) started using Facebookt o connect in community outside of the office.  I was intrigued and started to observe.  Facebook is a clean looking, professional social network tool with ever increasing functionality. It was starting to shatter my misperceptions.  I then took a look at some numbers and I was even more shocked.

There was a growing trend and it was not due to people trying to connect with long lost friends.  The trend shows the younger you are, the more likely you are to be online in one of these communities.

Here is a graph I created which shows the number of people subscribed to Facebook that graduated from my high school (average, nowheresville USA) for each graduating year since 1980.

Wow, did I feel old.  I felt like those poor mainframers who did not see the PC coming their way.  The online community is no longer a theoretical but a reality.  People who have graduated high school in the last 8 years are part of this new generation and at least on Facebook they are receiving these benefits:

  • Communicate with your friends in a group-like fashion
  • See which friends have upcoming birthdays
  • Take a custom question/poll among your friends
  • See what your friends are thinking about, dealing with, what their favorites are, or other activity (like where they’ve been or where they’ve lived)
  • See who your friends are friends with
  • See pictures/videos of your friends

More analysis needs to be done to figure out which things (if any) should be included in a church based community tool.  You must fight the desire to want to try to recreate a Facebook-like system for your church groups.  That’s a waste of time.  Facebook is already doing facebook – and your congregation won’t likely trade in their Facebook accounts for your system.