How about a Facebook Byzcath page? It would be a goodway to bring people to the forum who have ever wondered about whatever. What you think?

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=221920054569938&id=186003838161560

Holy Trinity Church, Sykesville PA. It got startrd on a whim. Not exactly catching on but then again I could be doing much more to promote it.

I ''liked'' your page. Lovely photos and great Iconatosis by the way. Very nice indeed.

stephen

I do not "do" Facebook and only occasionally ask to see some news feeds on my wife's account.

From what I have seen it appears to be an Eighth-Commandment-free zone populated mostly narcissists craving attention and voyeurs trolling for fairly intimate details of their friends activities; a match made somewhere but not in Heaven.

Something which would be well to "give up" in the Great Fast.

Like Pastor Thomas - I also do not do Facebook - and I've absolutely no intention of being caught in that trap.

I spend enough time on the Internet as it is , and learning that so-and-so has decided that they are my 'friend' and as a result think I'm interested in learning that they have popped out to get some groceries , really mindboggles me.

Facebook - you are not , and never will be , my friend and confidante.

ROFL - with all due respect to my dear friends, Pastor Thomas and Anhelyna, but their respective descriptions almost caused me to lose another keyboard to spluttered coffee.

I have used FB and have an account there still, but seldom use it lately - mainly because of time constraints engendered by my time here and working on the directory. My assessment of it, on the whole, would likely not differ much from what either of them have written, but I will admit that I do find it somewhat useful.

As one can tell from the timestamps on my posts, I keep odd hours - working late evenings and arriving home 'wired' post-midnight. Such makes it difficult to keep in touch with happenings involving friends and family who lead more 'normal' lives. So, in that respect, it is a help - though the incessant postings of near every jot of folks' daily living puts one in mind of 'reality' tv - which you couldn't pay me to watch (unless you paid me a very great deal, of course).

I struggled with the question of whether to include links to parish FB pages on directory entries, when those first became popular. Finally, I began adding them but with some trepidation because it isn't always clear which are 'official' (as in sanctioned by the priest) versus a parishioner's own well-intended but perhaps agenda-driven effort.

As many know, I am a long-standing advocate here of parishes utilizing whatever electronic means might be available both to educate and keep in touch with their current parishioners and to evangelize. And, like it or not, FB is medium by which one can do so.

As my brother and friend, Deacon Luke, notes of Holy Trinity's page, many are not highly utilized - but others I've seen are regularly flocked to by parish youth, viably promote church events, and - a few - seem to afford a place at which today's sometimes far-flung parishioners keep in touch with one another - something more easily done in a time when parishes were local and parishioners were your neighbors. I'm also aware of them being effectively used in lieu of a parish website by parishes that lack the finances, resources, or skills to create or maintain the latter.

So, I have to concede their value or potential value in those regards, though they are a nusciance from a directory standpoint, as it's much harder to find out who has one than it is to track down a traditional parish website. (LOL - how far we've come when I find myself speaking of parish websites as 'traditional' .) As a result, there are many more out there than I have yet logged into directory listings and that will be the case for quite a while yet.

Many years,

Neil

Deacon Luke is anything but a narcissist. He is humble and an amazing man of God who serves at Holy Trinity and in the Archeparchy selflessly. May God grant him many years.

I've no reason to doubt that, which is why I wrote that my impression of FB is that it is "mostly" (but not totally) comprised of narcissists and voyeurs. There are exceptions.

In the interest of even-handedness, I have seen similar abuses take place with LinkedIn, which is a networking site that I use. There is a "connection" colleague in the DC area who posts an update about every activity in his parish....sometimes the "hide" feature becomes tempting.

FB is certainly a useful tool for evangelisation, but it also invites ''isolation'' too of anyone who uses it. It can isolate us from the real presence of God and the community and can become extremely addictive. One nun in spain was recently let go from her monastery by the Abess simply because she spent way too much time on FB.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

I have found facebook useful as a means of disseminating information without any expense, to be exact, "Eastern Pro Life"

Byzcath.org is different; people come here for meaningful discussion; they can call it up as often or as little as possible. As a facebook page it would have very little utility, except as a tool to reach the younger set who lives on facebook. The limitation is the restriction of the length of each post.

As Neil said, it is a good way to keep up with relatives, although sometimes it becomes "too much information."

I looked (briefly) at Twitter and I found absolutely no redeeming value by engaging it.

Αιωνία η μνήμη


Just trying to see if something works...I hope?

Kolya

No it does not work any more

thanks

Kolya

Yeah - we have noticed - the ability to use Cyrillic fonts has disappeared

Try again. When I upgraded the software the other day the system defaulted back to English character only mode. I've just updated the setting.

Ангелина