GodTube becomes Tangle
Feb 4, 2009 Social Media, Video, social networking
A few weeks ago, I was tipped off by YouthMinistryGeek (who recently got a nice redesign) that GodTube, the Christian online video service that raised 30 million dollars in funding last year, would soon be changing its name. After watching a funny video by the Skit Guys, which formally let users know of the upcoming change, I was intrigued at what was to come.
Sure enough, I pulled up GodTube.com today only to be redirected to Tangle, the new version of the site, including a redesign to go along with it. The site now offers not only video sharing – but blogs, photos, music (band pages), playlists, and more. It essence, it’s now a Christian version of MySpace.
I must admit, I’m always skeptical when Christians take ideas that have already been done well by someone else and make the faith-based. However, if it’s going to be done, it must be done well. And given the funding that the service received, it looks like they have put the time and resources into doing it well. What do you think about it?
Tags: godtube, myspace, Social Media, social networking, tangle, Video
Friday Video: A Christmas Greeting
Dec 26, 2008 Video
Since my last post talks up the service animoto provides, I thought it would be great to show you what it can do here on ThreeParts. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!
http://www.vimeo.com/2633594Much thanks to Relient K, one of Meredith’s clients, for the soundtrack.
Tags: animoto, christmas, Friday Video, greeting, Video
Animoto: A Great Solution for Youth Group Videos and Christmas Greetings
Dec 22, 2008 Video
I found a link to animoto via Tim Schmoyer’s blog last week. It’s a great service that allows you to upload pictures and music and automatically create a video greeting for friends and family. Not only is this a great solution for creating youth group videos, but a nice, professional, budget friendly alternative to Christmas cards! Here’s the low-down.
Friday Video: Senior Adult Choir Hip Hop
Dec 19, 2008 Video
Enjoy – and share it with your students!
How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts On The Web
Dec 13, 2008 Social Media, Twitter, Video
Update: You may also want to read How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts On Your Desktop
As someone who manages several Twitter accounts between work and my personal life, I was thrilled to come across Splitweet this week. Splitweet is a website that allows you to setup the credentials for each Twitter account you run to pull all of your Twitter feeds on to one page. The tweets from all of your accounts appear in one stream. While this sounds like it might get confusing, the service assigns each of your accounts a different color. To the far right of each tweet, there is a small box that is colored to coincide with the account that the tweet is associated with. It uses the same feature to show you which accounts you sent each tweet from.
Just as if you were logged into Twitter, you can post tweets, send replies, and even direct messages across all of your accounts.
One thing I love about the site is the ‘brand mentions’ area in the sidebar. Rather than having to use TweetScan or visit Twitter Search, Splitweet displays any mention of your brand on the same page that you send and read your tweets from. It displays your most recent @replies in the sidebar as well.
While I absolutely love how much easier Splitweet has made my life over the past few days, there is one major feature that keeps me going back to the Twitter website from time to time.
The site does not give you the ability to manage your followers. Yes, there are sites that allow you to do this outside of Twitter – such as MyTweeple.com. But the goal here is consolidation. I don’t want to have to visit more than one site to manage my accounts (mainly because I’m lazy). As a general rule, I try to follow everyone that follows me. While Splitweet does show you an estimated ‘tweet audience’ when you choose which account to send a tweet to, there is no way to see your newest followers and follow them back. So for my main LifeWay account, StudentMinistry, which gets a couple of new followers every day – I still have to visit Twitter to manage them.
In addition to Splitweet, this video by CHURSMO shows how you can use Netvibes to display all of your accounts on one page. However, Splitweet offers more funcationality.
Overall, I give Splitweet 4 out of 5 stars.
Tags: churchsmo, Social Media, splitweet, Twitter
A Great Comparison of Mini HD Camcorders
Dec 12, 2008 Video
I’ve seen a lot of youth workers talking about mini HD camcorders in the blogosphere and on Twitter lately. These cameras (HD or not) have so many applications from a youth ministry perspective that it’d be hard to outline them all. From video podcasts to youth group announcements, the small size and usability of the devices for these things trumps your average camcorder in seconds. The Flip MinoHD seems to being getting the most attention out of them all. In an effort to see if this attention is warranted, I did little research. While the majority of my research was limited to Amazon.com user ratings and reviews, nothing proved to me which mini HD model was the best. It took me venturing out to Vimeo before I found something truly valuable to help me compare two models. The video below puts video from the Flip MinoHD side-by-side with video from the Kodak Zi6 Mini HD camcorder, with sound. Watch, listen and enjoy.
http://www.vimeo.com/2254096Based on this video, I don’t believe the winner is the MinoHD. The sound and color on the Zi6 is much better. I’m still waiting to see a side-by-side comparison of the VadoHD with the Zi6 before I make my final decision on which I think is best.
