More on social networking and the church

Two more things caught my eye in the last few days regarding social networking and the church.

First, Joe Suh of Digital Leadnet offered some thoughtful comments about how APIs for social networking sites will allow people to use many of them simultaneously. I've spoken about his previously, citing the thinking of Dave Winer that Twitter could become the de facto standard for sharing personal identity. (Remember when Microsoft tried to do this with Passport?)

Second, Robert Scoble did a video demo of Zude. The way the demo unfolds requires you to have a lot of patience. If you hang in there, after 10-15 minutes the power of Zude will start to become apparent. Zude is a social network like Facebook, etc. but it has a very powerful way for non-programmers to create, layout, and dress up their pages. More importantly, the demo shows how it allows for an extreme level of interoperability with other social networking systems. Also interesting is the fact that Zude is built on a web application framework and stack called Open5G that seems vaguely competitive with the much-heralded Ruby on Rails.