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Church Social Networking with MyChurch

Michael Zhang · September 6, 2006

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MyChurch.org is a social networking service for church communities. Features offered include sermons and media, a social network, a classifieds board, a collaborative blog, a photo sharing app, and an event calendar. Basically, it aims to take the strong church communities you find in real life, and duplicate it online.

This sounds like a strong idea, given how interactive and strong real life church communities are, but the big question is whether or not church members need or want to have an additional way of interacting with each other. Additionally, how many people in a given church are tech savvy enough to jump onto the social networking train? Myspace and Facebook focus on teen and college student market that have grown up in front of their computers... MyChurch will find it hard to produce the kind of interest and buzz other social networks have generated.

An obvious problem with the current service is how their domain name has a ".org" extension. If people begin to refer to this service as "MyChurch", then a lot of users are going to type in "MyChurch.com" in their browsers, taking them to a parked page. If MyChurch wants to be more accessible, it needs to buy the ".com" extension of their name. This is reminiscent of the early Facebook days, when "facebook.com" was already taken and the service used the domain name "thefacebook.com". It was a smart thing for Facebook to buy the simpler name early on.

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Comments

Joe Suh on September 6, 2006 4:38 PM

Thanks for the link Michael.

As far as the need, I think there is definitely interest in social networking among church communities. During our private beta, we've had 100+ churches sign on. Some churches have even resorted to using myspace to take advantage of blogging, music/photo sharing, and networking (ex. www.lifecitychurch.com)

If web 2.0 is about community, there are few niches more conducive to community than churches.

As far as being tech savvy, we agree this can be a big issue. Hopefully young folks will jump on first and show the older congregants how to use social networking. We tried to make the site as simple as possible to deal with the fact that our main demographic is not the web-savvy college student...

Michael Zhang on September 6, 2006 4:49 PM

Great comment Joe.

I agree that you're tapping into a very solid existing real life community, and that this is a great niche for a social network.

We'll see if you can do for churches what myspace did for bands and facebook did for students.

Good luck!

Kent on November 7, 2006 7:40 PM

Another Christian social network you should check out is www.Oaktreeidea.com

Dan on April 20, 2007 7:58 PM

And some more:

www.biblogg.com
www.godtube.com

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