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"Looks like we've got another contender on the Christian social networking scene.  Newcomer MyChurch offers profile pages, commenting, blogging, bulletins and the ability to add friends to your network.  There are also various privacy options like establishing who can view your profile or leave comments.  Other features include friend mapping, calendaring and security settings like the ability to set your profile as private, hide your age, establish who can leave comments and set your blog to friends-only.  Churches have moderation controls, collaborative blogs, photo galleries, event calendars, bulletins and local groups within the church.  Churches also have a media library where they can upload audio, videos and documents, a classified ads board, the ability to add other churches as \"friends\" and the option to accept online donations via Paypal.\nNonetheless, they're keen to avoid the inevitable \"MySpace for Christians\u201D label.  Joe Suh, one of the site's founders, explains that they're trying to do for churches what Facebook has done for colleges - Christian churches in the US can establish their own networks for free, or pay $12/month for extra storage and more features.  Alternatively, a church member can pay the fee and receive recognition for doing so.  Suh says the target market is Christians (whether they attend church or not) aged 20 to 30 who find MySpace too sophomoric.\n\nI tested both types of account, and while the feature set is basic, it's well put together.  Some nice touches include MySpace-style profile editing (paste your MySpace codes and widgets into the About Me section), as well as the ability to import your contacts from MySpace, Friendster, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail.    You can also import an external blog via the RSS feed, just like Facebook Notes.  They claim to have 250,000 churches in their database, although it's not clear how many of those have been claimed by church leaders.\nI've got to say I love this idea.  Taking any established community from the offline world and bringing it online makes a lot of sense - especially when that community isn't tech-savvy (schools, colleges, churches).  MyChurch appears incredibly simplistic at first glance, but the minimalist interface means there's nothing to distract you from the main aim - networking with others .  The secret to their success lies in getting all the churches on board as soon as possible - if they can win over the official bodies in the US and scale rapidly as Facebook have done, MyChurch could really take off.  If not, they could go the same way as many of Facebook's rivals - disappearing into obscurity.  For now, I'm quietly optimistic.\nSee also: OakTreeIdea, MySpace For Christians and MuslimSpace, MySpace for Muslims.\n\nAttention MyChurch Users!\nMashable's MyChurch profile is here - if you're a MyChurch member, be sure to add Mashable to your friends list!\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/08/25/mychurch-the-facebook-of-churches/>