It is primarily a tool for managing music and assisting musicians, and doesn’t include the additional rostering functionality that you’ll find with Elvanto and Planning Center Online.

Some of the extra features SongBook brings to the table are:

• 2650 songs already loaded and ready to use,
• the ability to generate PowerPoint slides,
• view songs by service (e.g. Sundays at 9.45am), and how many times the song has been sung in a given time period,
• the ability to create user accounts (e.g. for musicians and worship leaders at church)

It’s also possible to add in other elements to a set – i.e. you could use SongBook to create a basic service structure for your services:

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1. Searchtastic. Type in a Twitter username, press enter, and you’ll get a link to download an Excel spreadsheet of all the tweets for that user. This is my preferred tool – it’s free, easily, and reliable.
2. TweetScan Backup. This is also a very handy tool that allows you to select what you’d like to export – your tweets, your friends, direct messages, @replies, followers, favourite tweets – or a full archive. It will then export as a .CSV or HTML file.
3. TwitPrint. You’ll need to sign-in with your own account (i.e. you can’t get an export of another user), but TwitPrint does include some handy features, e.g. the ability to only print tweets that include particular keywords. It will also enable you to get a pretty print-out of your selected tweets. A similar tool is Print Your Tweets.

For more on this topic, check out ‘10 ways to archive your tweets‘ from Read Write Web.

On a related note, Twitter Export allows you to export a list of the friends or followers or a particular Twitter user, as a .CSV file.

Update:

1. twDocs is another nifty tool. One of the good features of this tool is the ability to choose the file type you’d like to export to – e.g. PDF, TXT, CSV and more.

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I could understand that bio if someone else wrote it for him, but who outsources the authoring of their Twitter bio?!

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As I was having a play I discovered the ‘Social Trends‘ page where you can “Search your favorite brands, television shows, movies, or celebrities to get the latest viral stats”. I think these are basically just reports on topics that you don’t have to pay for.

I don’t know how, but ‘God’ got made it into the ‘brand’ category!

In the report you can see social trends for ‘God’ for the week on different channels, e.g. microblogs (i.e. Twitter)

You can also see trends on Facebook, blogs, websites and videos. Check out the full report.

It’s not particularly accurate (e.g. the mentions of God on Twitter and video were blasphemous!):

…but this could be a useful tool for other purposes. For example, I use Google Alerts to monitor what is being said about the Kirribilli community.

Check out Viral Heat’s Social Trends.

Interested in social media monitoring? Check out this wiki of 145 products.

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“Every day, millions of people share how they feel with the people who matter the most in their lives through status updates on Facebook. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They’re brief, to the point and descriptive of what’s going on this week, today or right now…Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling.”

The graph is available for 22 countries – here’s Australia:

Try adding the positivity and negativity metrics, and see the interesting results. It surprised me.

See the full details on our Gross National Happiness here (and check out your own country, if it’s not Australia!).

Thanks @andyjamo for putting me onto this.

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If you’re thinking of doing something similar for your church or ministry, be sure to check out Facebook’s guidelines, and Twitter’s guidelines.

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Yesterday, SMH (via Business Insider) published a transcript of a conversation between founder Mark Zuckerberg and a friend. The transcript goes:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb f–ks.

Charming.

Frightening.

Read the article at Facebook founder feels the heat as privacy backlash rages.

If you’d like to read up about Facebook and the criticism it’s been receiving about the privacy of its users information, here’s some articles I’ve come across recently. In each of the articles, you’ll find lots more links off to more articles!

• Facebook is not your friend
• Facebook removes your profile rights and choices
• Some quitting Facebook as privacy concerns escalate
• 10 new privacy settings every Facebook user should know
• Facebook: friend or foe for social networkers?
• Top 10 reasons you should quit Facebook (this post attracted 234 comments!)
• Why you should still quit Facebook (follow-up to the above)
• Facebook glitch brings new privacy worries
• How to protect your privacy
• The history of Facebook’s default privacy settings (an interesting ‘infographic’)
• Facebook executive answers readers questions
• Facebook needs to find its voice on privacy
• More web industry leaders quit Facebook
• Four nerds and a call to arms against Facebook (I don’t think they’ll make a dent though!)
• Facebook privacy: a bewildering tangle of options (f0r example, the word count for Facebook’s privacy statement has increased 5-fold since 2005)

And if you’re freaked out or fed up and want to delete your account, follow these instructions:

• How to permanently delete your Facebook account (it’s a worry when such detailed instructions are needed just to delete an account!)

Will you be deleting your Facebook account?

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It’s well-written and easy to read, and explores the impact of Facebook on its users, and how we (as Christians) can use it for our good, the good of others, and for God’s glory. I’ll review it in more detail soon.

As I read the book, I reflected on the emotions that Facebook (and other social media) generate in us. Here’s some examples.

1. I posted a link on Facebook and I checked back later to discover that “3 friends like this”. This made me feel happy. People liked something that I shared.
2. I posted another link on Facebook about a Christian preacher arrested in London. 2 people liked that, and I felt confused. Did they like that I posted it, or that the preacher was being persecuted?
3. I saw someone I knew on Facebook and sent them a friend request. I received notification that they accepted my friend request. This made me feel happy. They want to be my friend! It was a strange feeling, because friendships in the ‘real’ world don’t work like that – you don’t reach a point when someone officially confirms they are your friend – it’s an organic process from stranger, to acquaintance, to friend.

With this realisation, one of the obvious dangers of Facebook becomes clear – our temptation to act to please people, to be well thought of and to make ourselves feel good. While not always bad, this is a temptation most of us need to spend far more time fighting than succumbing to.

Can you think of any other examples of the unusual emotions that social media prompts?

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1. Hillsong Church
2. Mars Hill Church (Seattle)
3. Willow Creek Community Church
4. Petersham Evening Church
5. Village Church (Texas)
6. Village Church (Sydney)
7. Dubbo Presbyterian Church
8. NewSpring Church
9. Northside Baptist Church
10. Granger Community Church
11. The Adundant Life Church
12. Hunter Bible Church
13. Park Community Church (by far the most innovative landing page)
14. 24 Church
15. Woodlands Church
16. Saddleback Church
17. College Park Church
18. Pinelake Church
19. Seacoast Church
20. Hope Church
21. Liquid Church (the best landing page for a church I’ve seen)
22. Fellowship Church
23. 12Stone Church
24. Northway Church
25. Substance Church
26. Cottonwood Church
27. Bayside Church
28. C3 Church
29. Sovereign Grace Baptist Church (Brisbane)
30. Brooklake Church

Three observations

1. Before you start a Facebook page for your church, check for duplicates. In my search for churches on Facebook, I saw several churches with more than one page. Obviously this is confusing for people searching for a church/your church. Equally obviously, this is quite easily fixed!
2. Some churches didn’t display any information about what they believe, or the mission of their church. For example, what on earth is Skull Church, and what does it believe?! You can always check out their website (listed in the ‘Info’ tab), but it doesn’t hurt to provide this information up front.
3. Some mission statements are very short and simple (e.g. ‘Connect and Grow’) others more interesting (e.g. ‘We’re here so that you can waste time on Facebook. Oh, and also stay in the loop of all that’s going on. . I liked this introduction for its potential to engage with newcomers who are unfamiliar with church – ‘We don’t care how you dress or who you voted for. Join us for one of 3 services. No church experience required!’
4. Facebook’s search mechanism is confusing. I know there are churches on Facebook with ‘church’ in their title, but when I searched for pages using the term ‘church’, they didn’t appear. There also doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the order churches appear in the search results. Each time I attempted a search different results would appear in a different order!

If your church is on Facebook, let us know about it, and share the link below!

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Her tweets during the Logies have resulted in her being sacked by The Age (where she was a columnist). news.com.au sums up the worst of her tweets:

“Deveny drew the most criticism for writing that she hoped 11-year-old TV star Bindi Irwin “gets laid” and that former TV host Rove McManus’ wife Tasma “didn’t die too” – referring to the loss of his first wife Belinda Emmett to cancer in 2006.”

According to The Age, Deveny justifies her comments:

“It was just passing notes in class, but suddenly these notes are being projected into the sky and taken out of context,” she said.

It’s hard for 140 character tweets to be taken out of context. She also seems blissfully unaware of the power of the medium – did she think that no one was listening? If she thought no one was listening, why was she speaking?

Is she sorry?

“I meant every single word,” she said.

It’s a shame she can’t see the hurt she caused.

You can do a lot of damage in 140 characters. The tongue truly is a fire – and Christians can be just as guilty of using harmful words, and need to be just as careful with how we use our tongue – literally, and virtually.

Let’s not be ignorant of the power and influence of social media – what you say can be read, re-tweeted and will remain online forever.

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