wfn.org | United Church of Christ Expands Online Social Networking

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

> Written by Staff Reports
> August 11, 2009

New features added recently to myUCC have greatly expanded the robustness of the United Church of Christ's social networking community at ucc.org.

"Many of the new features have been among the most requested since we launched myUCC last spring, so we're very excited about the changes," says the Rev. J. Bennett Guess, the UCC's director of communications.  "Users can now post immediate status updates and view aggregated feeds of others' activities."

Here's a rundown of the new features:Community Activity Feed:   Now, like Facebook, the whole myUCC community is much more integrated. Anytime a user posts a comment, adds a photo, creates a blog, etc., an aggregated feed pulls that information to the shared community page. "It's a much more robust experience and a greater incentive to return to the site more often," Guess says. <http://community.ucc.org>Check it out.

Status Updates:  Micro-blogging has finally arrived at myUCC. "It's now much easier to express an opinion or update others about what you're doing," Guess says. "Like Facebook or Twitter, you can now share your 'status' in one easy step."  Input your status from the "What are you doing?" box on your individual "my home" page.  While Facebook and Twitter allow for status updates of only 140-160 characters, myUCC provides space for up to 500 characters per post. 
"The ability to comment on others' status reports is in development, and we hope to add that functionality soon," says Guess.

Document sharing:  Groups can now share documents on their group pages so that others can read and provide feedback. The system supports several different file types ­ .doc, .ppt, .xls, .pdf, 
.txt, .xml, .csv, .vsd, .mp3, .wma, .wav, and
.zip files. A group's administrator needs to add the first document to make the "files" tab appear at the top of the group page. 
<http://community.ucc.org/app/render/go.aspx?con=SODocumentsDefault&g=be ebcad8-8b45-4b5f-add9-aa1dd68a1215&cons_id=&ts=1249312531&signature=44 55e22e3c825269701aeee903aba362>Here's an example.

Group forums:  myUCC groups can now integrate forums into their group pages, in order to enhance discussion among a group's members.

These new features are in addition to several functionalities added in the last few weeks, including:

Remote Commenting:  Registered myUCC members can add personal comments to United Church News stories. 
<http://www.ucc.org/news/united-church-of-christ.html>Here's an example.

Twitter Integration:  Twitter feeds are now integrated on the right-side of myUCC users' profile pages.  <http://community.ucc.org/Kirk>Here's an example.

Individual Activity Feeds:  Each profile page includes an update feed on what that person has been doing in the myUCC community. 
<http://community.ucc.org/profile/app/main/publicprofile.aspx?puid=fa36f99 c-3bd1-4455-8239-4460dc31b93a&cons_id=&ts=1249314112&signature=7fd8180 acabffaa7a3185ed2c2d48b3d>Here's an example.

Creature Cookies: Users now receive and award points or "creature cookies" based on involvement.  <http://community.ucc.org/community/ranking.htm>Learn more.

KYeP Integration:  We're now featuring the latest myUCC blog entries in our weekly KYeP e-zine blasts. 
<http://act.ucc.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=13761.0&dlv_id=17401>Here's
an example.

"We think all myUCC users are going to be pleased with these significant improvements," Guess says, 
"and we anticipate announcing even more improvements and additional features in the coming weeks and months."

The myUCC community now includes 3,767 registered users. Guess says he's hoping the community will reach at least 10,000 by the end of 2009.