Earlier this week I came across an announcement that Hinduism Today is on Facebook since August 5. Earlier this week I came across an announcement that Hinduism Today is on Facebook since August 5. The announcement made me wonder whether all religious magazines have Facebook pages. I did a quick search, limited to Hindu magazines in English, and found that according to Wikipedia there are two more Hindu magazines: Vedanta Kesari and Prabuddha Bharata. I checked and both has only "community pages" on Facebook, here and here respectively, meaning they were set up automatically by Facebook, copying Wikipedia content, and not by active people or organizations. This week I happened to watch Seth Priebatsch's TED talk "The game layer on top of the world." In his introduction to his main points he said "There's still a lot of people who are trying to figure out social... but the framework itself is done, and it's called Facebook." I also heard from other sources recently the opinion that Facebook is the de facto standard of social web and there is nothing we can do about it. I agree that with half a billion users Facebook is unavoidable for any individual or organization wanting to participate in the online social world. However I disagree with the idea that there is no chance that this situation would change in the future. Those who think so, forget the history of the internet. Most gamechanging companies/applications were not foreseen. Nobody saw half a year before Gooogle, MySpace, Twitter, or Facebook started to rise. We don't know whether there is a company out there that is in the process of creating an application that may become even bigger than Facebook in terms of userbase. Who knows, it might be Priebatsch's SCVNGR. Furthermore we do know that Google is working on something social. Google invested heavily in a social gaming company (Zynga) in July, and just this month it purchased a virtual currency company (Jambool), a social app company (Slide), and separated its social update search (Realtime). These all point to the rumored "Google Me" social game. After the failed and dead Google Wave and the still living but unsuccessful Google Buzz they may come up with the wining formula. Google may be the next big social game of the future. But I cannot stop thinking what of adherents of one of the biggest religions create and join a social network. That could instantly be as big as Facebook. Christianity has lots of denomination and even the Catholic church is not as undivided as some may want it to be. Similarly the world of Islam is full of fractions too. I know little bit less about divisions within Hinduism, but wanted to mention it as there are 900 million Hindus, close to twice as much as many Facebook users. Nevertheless of the above imagine if there would be a single social network site serving all Muslims, or all Hindus, or all Christians or all Catholics. Better yet, what if there would be a single site serving the interfaith community of adherents. I see a humongous potential in such a venture. There are of course social networking sites for all the populations I mentioned above. But for one reason or another they are not as big as they could be. For the records here are some of them: Christian
Catholic
Muslim
Hindu
To recap this post
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Religious magazines are on Facebook,
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which is the de facto social networking site now,
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but maybe not be that forever.
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E.g. if Google enters the field or
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a successful religious site does.
