If you haven’t heard about Tokbox you’re missing out. It’s a great live video service that was launched a while back which we’ve covered here on ChurchCrunch a number of times (look below for “Related Posts), and I know that a lot of ministries are already beginning to use it extensively.
Personally, I really like the service and it’s been extremely useful for a number of projects and initiatives but with recent news that they’ve laid off 50% of their engineering staff (about 30% of their total staff) and the fact that all of the founders have left the company is a kick-in-the-groin type of reminder that if your ministry or church puts all of it’s chips into a particular technology that you’ll lose long-term.
The reality is that your technology and deployment of it is only as good as the technology’s existence. Makes sense, right?
So, the remedy to this to focus much more of your team’s attention on your long-term strategy, which is technology and platform agnostic, and is obviously much more sustainable and scaleable.
Don’t bank on tech… think about it in terms of the housing market right now… perhaps that’s a good (but unfortunate and sad) analogy to use.
Milan Ford says
you see – this is now #1,472…reasons why i love this blog!! great post John
human3rror says
thanks man! i love what i do and i love the community that's growing!
Daniel Decker says
Cool without sustainability is a no no. I worry about that a little with Twitter, not that they will lay off staff or close up shop as much but about the sustainability of being profitable. They've built such a massive tool, now they will have to monetize it to keep it afloat. When the monetizing kicks in that can also create doom (if not done right, with their users experience in mind).
Like a church that grows it's infrastructure (building, programs, etc) ahead of pace or puts too much of its resources in the structure. Sometimes they end up with their back against the way, fighting to pay the debt load versus being free to do ministry.
stephenbateman says
yea… Twitter had $55 milllion start up capital, so they've got a little while to figure it out.
But great point about churches (those who DON"T have 55mil)
human3rror says
you don't? lame!
j/k.
CoffeeWithChris says
Kind of like Daniel said, this is the truth in ministry in general. We need to always have our vision (long-term strategy) guiding us. As soon as we let any program or tool (technology) guide us, we are certainly looking for trouble.