Twitter is a microblogging  social networking application where you answer the question, “What are you doing now?” in 140 characters or less.  Picture a Facebook News Feed that just had status updates… and just had the people you were actually friends with/interested in paying attention to.  You can access the whole system via text message, via its website, or via any number of third party applications (including Facebook).  That is, I can send a text to Twitter with what I’m doing when I’m far from my computer.

Why not use Twitter?

1.  You need to know everything about everybody.  (Your an info junkie – you like to know what people are up to, thinking, feeling, doing… and that’s the end.  You want info for info’s sake.)

Perhaps you’re a gossip.  You want to know what people are up to because you care more about what they’re doing than you care about Jesus.   The more info you have, the more info you can “exchange,” and you’ll gain more info.  But of course, there’s a good, justifying reason for all of this: you and your 50 closest friends definitely need to be “praying” about everyone’s deepest, darkest struggles.

Perhaps you want to compare yourself to them to help you feel better about yourself – is your life as interesting as theirs?  Are you as popular as they are?   Does person A spend as much time with person B as she does with you? 

Or perhaps you look up to them, admire them, or even have a crush on them.  People-idols are very dangerous because there’s at times a very fine line between “follow me as I follow Christ” and “I follow Paul!”  

Perhaps you just want to be able to say you’re friends with them.  Yes, you can follow Mark Driscoll on Twitter.  No, it doesn’t make Jesus love you more.

All things to watch out for with Twitter.

2. You want everyone to know certain things about you.  You’re amazing.  Or at least, you’re interesting.  Or at least, you want people to think so.  People paying attention to us makes us feel good, and people paying attention to your carefully crafted Twitter feed will let them see how amazing you are.

Why use Twitter?

1. It shows Christians and nonchristians what you treasure.  What you do with your time?  What do you talk about?  What do you find interesting?  What do you find astonishing?  Do you love what God loves and hate what God hates?  Seeing Christians getting excited about Jesus and living for him is tremendously helpful to my soul.

2. Accountability and encouragement.  If I’m constantly using Twitter to answer the question “What are you doing?” people can be caring for me better be asking me, “How did that go?”.  This ties closely into point 1 – you can be encouraged by what other people value, you can encourage other people as they see Jesus transforming your life, and they can hopefully challenge you as they see your idols coming through.

3. Filling in the social fabric.  This can work at several levels.  For example, most of the Internet Strategies team at Desiring God uses Twitter.  Most of us don’t live in Minneapolis and work remotely.  By tweeting, we have a general idea of what each other is doing, even though we’re rarely together physically.

At a more intimate level, Ray and I are good friends who talk often.  We realized that often our conversations started (or at least included) the question “what are you doing now?”.  This is a question that we want to be asking each other, and that helps us understand each other, but it’s one that doesn’t need to be asked explicitly.  We have enough to talk about, we don’t need to talk about every single thing that we “are doing now.”  By tweeting, we’re answering that question for each other, AND allowing for further discussion in the case what we’re doing is actually interesting.

4. Collaboration, recommendation, and advice.  I tweet, “Going to see [insert movie here].”  The next day, you and your friends are looking for a movie to see.  You know that I’ve seen that one, so you can ask me what I thought of it.  I tweet, “Shopping on Amazon for a new pair of headphones.”  You just got a pair for Christmas that you really like, so you message me with a recommendation.  

5. Putting communication into the public space.  We already do this with Facebook walls.  Twitter has the notion of “replying”, where you can tweet a reply to a friend’s tweet.  Other’s can then reply to your reply.  Facebook has set the precedent for how this happens, and it really does mimick normal social interaction – we relate to each other in groups, not merely one-on-one.  Another way to state that is that one-on-one relationships exist within a larger social context, and Twitter helps put some communication back into that context.

6. It’s a durable status message.  Your Google Talk status message disappears when you change it.  Twitter keeps a log of your tweets.  Thus, you can tweet multiple times if you are doing multiple things (watching a Youtube Video while hanging out with people, for example).  And if you link this with point 4, the “gtalk status message dialog” that occurs occasionally is now durable as well, so others can more concretely follow your conversation (which you mean to be public, anyway, by putting it in your status).

Summary

Twitter is a tool.  It won’t save you.  It can be used for good or evil.  You can already use your computer to watch porn or to watch Piper.  You can already use your email to encourage or tear down.  Twitter may or may not be for you. Don’t just use it because it’s interesting.  Don’t just dismiss it because it seems stupid at first glance.  Be discerning.  Use Twitter – or don’t use Twitter – for the glory of God.

Try to see it as a tool to help build and maintain Gospel community and Gospel witness.  It is easy for Twitter to devolve into man-centeredness – pointing to yourself and your amazingness.  But, with God’s help, Twitter can be used to help us love Jesus more.

Thoughts?

-Ben

Includes: Ben, Liang, Rajiv, Ray, Ken (Arnold), Charlene, Crystal, Jeanne, John (Sullivan), Tom (Jackson)

If you’re not on my list, and feel you should be, post your blog’s url in the comments and I’ll add it.  I feel like I might be missing some of you…

-Ben

1. Use this file to install the Google Earth Plugin to run Google Earth objects in your browser (works with any Windows browser).

2. Go here to view the Joshua Project map.  You can click and drag to move around, and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

For more info on Joshua Project, you can check out this video.

-Ben

1. Go to desiringGod.org.

2. See how the arrow next to the Google Search Box is blue?  That means you can add a search function…

3. Click it and you’ll see the option.

4. Click “Add ‘DesiringGod.org Search’”.

5. Don’t try it out just yet… right now it’s set to open in the same tab.  To configure it to open in a different tab, go to about:config, click through the confirmation, and enter “browser.search.openintab” into the Filter.

6. Double-click on the line so that the “Value” (the right-most column) says “true”.

7. Try out your new search box.  Important keyboard shortcut: ctrl-k. This will focus the search box by putting the cursor there.  You’re now only a ctrl-k away from searching DG!

Bonus Step:  If you install Google Desktop Search, you can use the keyboard shortcut ctrl-ctrl (tap ctrl twice) to bring up a Google search box from within anywhere on your computer.

Let me know if you have any questions or problems.

-Ben

from [redacted]
to [redacted]
cc CBS-L@cornell.edu, CCFIV-L@cornell.edu, CHIALPHA-L@cornell.edu, COAH-L@cornell.edu, CRUSADE-L@cornell.edu, FCA-L@cornell.edu, GCF-L@cornell.edu, NAVS-L@cornell.edu, PRAYERVINE-L@cornell.edu
subject Re: [redacted]

hey [redacted],

don’t send things to all the listservs.  You should only do that when it’s relevant to everyone on the listserv

[redacted]

If so, then for the sake of the Gospel – and the rest of us – you should install this Greasemonkey script. Actually, even if you haven’t, you probably should install it anyway – it’s always good to think twice about who you send email to.  It will bug you every single time you click “Reply to all” in Gmail, so you’ll never unwittingly send an email to 3000 people without meaning to.

0. You need Firefox. Get it here.

1. Go here and install Greasemonkey by clicking the green “Add To Firefox” button. It will let you install tiny little scripts to modify webpages. Restart Firefox.

2. Go here and click the black “Install This Script” box on the top right.

-Ben

Flee from sexual immorality. – 1 Cor 6:18

How?  Block them all.

0. You need Firefox.  Get it here.

1. Go here and install Greasemonkey by clicking the green “Add To Firefox” button.  It will let you install tiny little scripts to modify webpages.  Restart Firefox.

2. Go here and click the black “Install This Script” box on the top right.

EDIT: That script adds an annoying “+” to all your pictures.  Use my version of it here.

EDIT 2:  Kill Xanga ads too: Here’s a script that should work reasonably well.

Should take you less than 3 minutes.

-Ben

To go along with that, you should install Google Gears.  Gears lets you run certain web applications offline – most importantly Google Docs!  Now you can have all of your Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations available and editable from anywhere.  You could probably live without MS Office or OpenOffice installed now.  Other significant Gears-enabled apps include Google Reader (an RSS reader) and Remember The Milk (a todo list application with a gmail plugin) – I use both and find both very helpful.

If you have any questions or need any help, let me know.

-Ben

1. I get to go to Bethlehem Baptist Church and hear John Piper preach every Sunday.
2. My walk to church is shorter than the walk down Ho Plaza.
3. I get to hang out in the BBC book store, which is basically what I’m always secretly hoping Borders will be every time I walk in.  Imagine (almost) every good Christian book, in one room.  (Not too many very dead guys, though there is a good number.)  I will probably come home with ~$500 of new books.
4. I get to go to real old-people Sunday School, which is something I’ve never gotten to do before in my life.
5. I get to go to BBC’s prayer meetings and evangelism times.  Last Tuesday we went street-EV’ing downtown, and we think a handful of people got saved!
6. I get to work at Desiring God.
7. I get to work at Desiring God whenever I want to, since they gave me keys .
8. DG gives us free Mountain Dew.
9. I get to work doing web programming, which is basically what I do with my free time during the summers anyway.
10. Job == Hobby => amazingness
11. I get to work with a team of godly Reformed Christian Hedonistic men and women wiser and more mature than I who treasure Jesus and the Bible and are working tirelessly for your joy and mine for the sake of the Gospel.
12. I get to work with Daniel and hang out with Joe and Liang, who are also here with me.
13. I get to meet and hang out with and learn from people who are doing things I want to be doing eventually, like going to TBI, planting churches, doing campus ministry, etc.

The project I’m working on is simultaneously very exciting and very daunting.  Objectively, it’s very clearly one of those “if this succeeds at all, it’s completely by God’s grace” things.  It can consume whatever time I’m able to throw at it, which so far has been a lot.  Like I said above, they’ve given us keys to the building, so we’ve been going home later and later each day.  Soon we’ll be keeping I-Banker hours.  Pray that the work would be done in active reliance on Jesus for wisdom and strength, and hope and joy in Jesus, not simply pretty code or solved problems.

There is one project that I can talk about – our accountability web application.  I’ll talk more about it in a later post.  Daniel’s been hard at work for the last few days writing it while I’ve been learning Ruby On Rails (he already knew it) and working on some administrative/environment stuff.  I thank God for him, the heart God’s given him, and his willingness and ability to serve the Body of Christ in building this tool.

I’ll give a more subjective analysis later.  Maybe I’ll get back into the habit of blogging often.  We’ll see…

-Ben

Google Book Search Now Smells Better

Gmail Custom Time

Google Calendar Wake Up Kit

Google Docs – Create a new document, click “File”, click “New airplane”

Google gDay with MATE

Google China: Human Search

And the big one…

Virgle

UPDATE:

Google Weblogs Beta

UPDATE 2:

Google Adwords FrankRank

Google Adsense for Conversations

Alas, we need your help.  If you have a netid@cornell.edu email address, you can register an account and send me the login info.  Or, better yet, just tell me and I’ll set up your account for you.  All you have to do is respond appropriately to the confirmation email.  Every legit account we get (read: no aliasing) gets us a few extra troops each turn.  Over the course of 40 more turns, that’s a lot of troops.

And if you want to actually play (and retain control of your troops instead of giving them to me), feel free.  It doesn’t take that much time – generally about 2 minutes a day.  And if you want to spend more time on it, you’ll observe some very interesting dynamics in terms of social networking, game mechanics, and web applications.

-Ben