openswitch

Most of you have heard about the site that just went Beta called “People 2 Pray.” It’s basically a site where you can post your prayer requests and others can post theirs. Confused are we? Skeptical as to the practicality of this service? I’m here to cut through the hype and give you the low down on People 2 Pray dot com.

Summary: If you’re looking for a way to connect with friends and family to share prayer requests then P2P may be right up your ally. To me it seems like the flickr of prayer; that’s not an insult but rather an observation. Overall the site is very well put together, well designed with great web2.0 graphics and AJAX is implemented in useful ways. I found myself thoroughly enjoying my experience at People 2 Pray.

Purpose of People2Pray: The purpose of P2P is two-fold. One purpose is to allow you to post and share your prayer requests with others online. The amount of privacy you want your request to have is completely up to you. In other words you can decide exactly who you want to be able to view your request. In order of most private to least private the request settings are: “No one can see it, only I can view my request,” “Share this request with those friends and communities which I choose” and “Share this request with everyone, this will be a public request.” The other purpose is to enable you to basically keep a prayer journal for yourself online. Since you’re able to restrict public viewing of any of your prayer requests this is a great way to keep a private, personal prayer journal which is a must-have for every Christian.

How it works: Signing up for this service is a breeze, 100% free and requires only a username, a password and a valid email address. Of course there’s the ever-present Terms Of Service agreement which is fairly easy to understand and should be read before signing up for this type of site. Screenshot:

After you sign up you’re taken to a screen from which you can set up your profile, add a new prayer request or go straight to viewing different communities and browsing the prayer requests of others. Setting up your profile really should be the first thing you do. Make sure, however, that the information you enter is exactly what you want it to be because while your prayer requests can be set to “private” your profile can not. Thankfully, you may enter as much or as little information about yourself as you feel comfortable sharing; and unlike Myspace, there’s no one asking you what high school you went to or whether you’re gay or straight.

If your purpose is to use this site solely for your own private prayer journal and don’t really want to share any prayer requests via this service then this is about as much as you’ll need to do. Just start entering prayer requests and have fun with the AJAX interface.

However, there’s much more this site can be used for. You can connect with people you already know, sharing prayer requests amongst each other. You can also dive into the public arena, meeting new people and praying for each other.

When you make a prayer request you assign it a category as well as one or more tags. In this way you can search for the request later (if it’s private) or others can find it via tag or category (if it’s public.) Here’s a screenshot of what the “connect” section of P2P looks like:

When you go to “Find People” or “Find Communities” you’re taken to a page that has a tag cloud with various keywords to search by:

You can now click away to your heart’s content. When you find a prayer request that particularly hits home with you or one you want to remember and check on later you can flag it. Flagging a request is sort of like book marking it, you’re able to find it later much more easily. You’re also able to leave comments on other’s prayer requests. Comments should of course be positive and encouraging.

People 2 Pray is intelligently put together, very intuitive and has the potential to be extremely useful. I’ve only hit on the main parts of the site in this review, I encourage you to sign up and take it for a test drive yourself. I can see this site being of particular interest to Bible study groups, youth groups and leadership teams. It could also be utilized by family or friends that are separated by distance. It’s by far the best way I know for people to stay up to date on each other’s prayer requests and answers. I give it two thumbs up.

[cross-posted at Blog Ministry]