Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

This is just plain cool. A senior in high school made a Facebook event to get his friends to all wear their YL shirts on the same day. Well, it caught on to say the least. When I last checked, 23,000+ people have “accepted” the invite to attend.

What other creative ways have you seen Facebook or other social media used to create momentum for things related to YL?

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Your mom has it. So does your dad. So does grandma and grandpa. Guess who else has it? Every kid that you probably know. Yup. Facebook. 500 million users and over half of active users login every day. I’m no expert but even I saw it coming. Heck, I even published a theological paper with references to it.

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Over the summer I normally try to post a couple things that I learned over the previous school year. These are a little late, but I really wanted to pass them along anyway. Also if you have anything you learned from last year that you would like to tell me about, send it my way smcgever (at) pv dot younglife dot org

Usually when I need something that I don’t have I just Google it and start my search. I do this with things for club, things for my home, all kinds of stuff. I bet you do that too.

In my spare time I like to read Wired magazine and all kinds of other sources of technology information. One thing that tech journalists are always covering is the battle between Google and Facebook. Google has a monopoly on internet information. Facebook has a monopoly on information and access on your friends. So it dawned on me (and probably many of you too) one day, instead of looking to Google for information and stuff I need to get, why don’t I look on Facebook. For instance I wanted to sell my car and buy a different one. Instead of putting my car on Craigslist or Autotrader, I told all my friends on Facebook. The benefit is that they know me, for better or worse haha, but many of them know a lot about my car and probably have been in it before. So a few weeks later, my car was sold at a great price to someone who really needed it.

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I just got an iPhone and I love it! The interface is unbelievable. Some of the applications like the Google Map integration and the Facebook iPhone web-app have been really useful.

There are a couple things I’m trying to figure out to maximize it for YL usage. Maybe this will be in the iPhone 2.

1) Is there a better way to group text message? Right now you can pick the individuals for a multi-person text, but not a way to manage a group. The Treo had a great free program to do this.

2) How to best organize my contacts on the phone. I have a lot of contacts, over 1100. As far as I know the iPhone doesn’t do any sorting or categories. One of my leaders enters club kids phone numbers with "YL" in front of the name. (i.e. YL – John Smith) This way they are all together and easy to find.

QUESTION: How do you organize your club kids names for easy retrieval? Also, any iPhone tips would be appreciated.

Many of you already know this, but Myspace is losing its grip on being the "in" thing for students. Facebook is all the rage.

I overhead a group of 17-20 year olds last night… "Braa, I never check Myspace anymore. I can’t remember the last time I did".

It seems like the younger the person, the more likely they are to be into Myspace, while the older they are the more they are into Facebook. This makes sense since Facebook was originally a college-based site.

I think we will see more and more high school students moving to Facebook, and soon Wyldlife kids too. If you use Myspace to connect with students, you might want to consider Facebook if you haven’t already.

Are you seeing this too?