I think it's great. Yeah, it's rough for web companies, but as long as I, as a pastor, can keep up with the trends, I can keep up with my people a whole lot easier. If a sheep is having a rough day at work and tweets some subtle frustration, I can @ back encouragement immediately instead of waiting until Sunday, at which point it'll likely be ancient history. Even waiting for them to get home and post a note in a forum is too late.

What we really need, to answer one of Matt's tweets from this morning, is a way for ministries to keep up. We can use standard tools like Twitter, etc., but do we need to develop some kind of app/widget/etc. that can somehow spiritually go beyond what those apps can do? It seems the church is so often behind the curve on these things, and getting some stuff out there, even for visibility, would be excellent. Meeting actual needs where they're not now being met, though, would give cake to the icing.

This also has me thinking about how pathetic Powerpoint/Keynote is for presentations. Someone needs to develop a better tool. Slide shows, regardless of transitions and FX, are still "what we did on our summer vacation." I think the slide projector is just a bad idea for a model. iMovie 08 is probably a better tool, but I'm even trying to think beyond that, but not sure what's next, keeping in mind that presentation must never overshadow content.

Sorry, that turned into a brain dump, but I think there are some nuggets in there somewhere.

Dale
Cohost, CrossFeed Religious News Podcast
http://www.crossfeednews.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp

There needs to be some good and solid talk about this stuff... and soon. A plan on how to keep up with noticing the trends, passing them on to the church, and providing out of the box solutions for churches right then and there.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

I think yes and no. I look at my participation in all three places. Almost everything I post here involves a deeper response to a question and ends up being 300 to 400 words long. That sort of thing doesn't fit into Twitter's 140 characters, which works better for quick questions, comments and random tweets.

I'm still not sure how FriendFeed fits in to the whole mix, I have a blog post churning about that issue. Then again, time spent both here and Twitter takes time away from my own blog. That's not a complaint, just part of the equation.

I'd say that some of my relationships have deepened more through the organic nature of Twitter, but the discussions here are more in depth. I'm more likely to return here to recall technical details. I bookmark good info from tweets and move on. Going back through old Twitter posts can be a Proverbs 26:11 experience.

So, if some of the chatter moves away to other services, and what's left here on the G&G website is more lasting and meaningful conversation, is that a bad thing?

One last thought: I monitor the G&G comments feed in Bloglines, and maybe get to check that out once every day or two. I came and checked out this post as soon as I saw your tweet about it.

Micah
(In a mere 230 words!)

Here is Oz we have an expression "horses for courses" (ie the right tool for the job).

I came across this thread initially from the plain old G&G RSS feed. For guys like me (in another timezone) this forum is a great way to keep in touch.

The G&G forum is a great (and increasing) storehouse of collected Drupal wisdom. A forum also allows people to consider their responses, and to respond at a time which suits them. It would be a shame if this were to become diluted via the instant gratification of platforms like Twitter - we should never allow considered discussions to be reduced to mere soundbytes.

My only criticism is about the physical nature of the Drupal forum system itself - with other forum packages (phpbb et al) there seems to be better ways of keeping on top of stuff like your own posts, and notification and tracking of responses to your posts (and other posts that you might be subscribed to). But that's a Drupal-wide thing...

I've been looking for a way to subscribe to these forums, and yeah, the feed. Duh. Problem: http://geeksandgod.com/forums/all/feed is 404.

Dale
Cohost, CrossFeed Religious News Podcast
http://www.crossfeednews.com

The URL was wrong on the feeds page, it's now been corrected. The proper URL for the overall forum feed is:
http://geeksandgod.com/forum/all/feed

-Rob Feature
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mustardseedmedia.com

I've been thinking about this one a lot and have organized my thoughts at http://www.crossfeednews.com/blog/pastordale/chris...

Dale
Cohost, CrossFeed Religious News Podcast
http://www.crossfeednews.com