[sword-devel] Social Media and Crosswire

[Mike Hart]

Last year there was some discussion about Crosswire and Sword opportunities in social media. That discussion has produced some alpha tests of new applications, and I look forward to more. 


In the last week or so I had a basic epiphany about social media that is really below much discussion, except for the fact that the pieces are all present on Crosswire, but not quite put together. 


The epiphany about social media is:

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The core of all social media is plain simple URL's.
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That is, our ability to share images, music, interests, news, ideas is at it's core the ability to share URL's. 


What makes youtube so widely quoted in social media is that their links are open. I might just as easily share music from archive.org if they had a plain URL that would autostart the player. Archive.org doesn't autostart by default (you can hack to do it, but it isn't easy), so I don't share links from there very often. 

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Bring it home to Crosswire:  


Crosswire is not more widely quoted in social venues because the URL's for sharing information aren't readily available.  


Specific examples:


1. Last year I mentioned in some forum that the web biblestudy app is easily hacked to be an open linking system, but it isn't simply a copy or drag the address bar to your social venue.   As a result, I will use more readily available URL's (bible.cc and biblegateway.com) because they ARE copy/paste.  I can hack the crosswire website URL easily enough, but it takes time, and time is not abundant in my world. I (and others) would link to the Crosswire Web Bible Study more often if it were a matter of navigating to the passage of interest and then copying the URL at the top of the screen. Linking drives awareness drives interest drives adoption drives success.  


2. There are many times I'd like to refer to the crosswire forum or developer's email.  On some occasions I cut/paste text or the object (URL) of interest from an email and put it onto social sites. Crosswire gets no real word of mouth advertising this way.  The forum is locked up behind a login (try linking while logged in then pasting when not logged in) and the email list has an archive method on nabble (with open URL's), but it's not easy to find it, since the only notices I get about nabble are mentions in passing from David Haslam when he refers to it.  Putting a link to it on the web or at least in  the monthly reminder email would make locating the nabble site much easier. That is, I would love to share some of the more general sword developer topics socially (advertising the community as well as individual topics,) but the means to do so is largely hidden. 

There are more opportunities like this on the site. :-)  
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