What is Khutbah FB and Khutbah Twitter?

2Hazrul Azhar Jamari • 9th Oct 2009 • My Notes, Business, Internet Presence, My Notes, Life, My Notes, My Notes, Defunct Categories, Singapore Stuff • Facebook, Facebook Note, iPhone, Online Communities, RSS, Social network, Twitter, Video clip

I started to tweet Khutbahs when I had Twitter on my iPhone. I gave my opinions about the mosque handling of the Friday prayers, its facilities and the content of khutbahs.

A good friend of mine, Saiful, has also been tweeting his thoughts on the Khutbahs. So after a short brainstorm, Saiful set up a Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com/khutbah. He intended to tweet his reflections on the Khutbah from this account.

So today, another development in community action happened. I decided to help improve the original idea. I created a Facebook Page called “Khutbah” and linked it to the @khutbah Twitter account. This way, either of us can tweet regardless if we’re on Facebook or Twitter.

Then I realised that Facebook offered a richer experience, and so I proceeded to use MUIS Khutbah download page as raw data. Currently, the Jemaah would need to download the khutbah as a MS Word document. It’s neither user friendly nor is it easy to syndicate. So I copied and pasted, screenshot Arabic pdfs and formatted them nicely into Facebook Notes.

Now the full text of the Khutbahs are formatted into an easy to read, and highly share-able format! The Facebook format!

I thought that this was a fantastic way to distribute the Khutbah text, not only between the Jemaah, but between Khatibs too. So I tagged all the Imams and Ustaz I know in each Facebook Note.

The Khatibs would now be able to turn on their iPhone (please switch to silent mode), and launch their Facebook app, and go to “Notes about me” to deliver their sermon from their iPhone, Blackberry or any Facebook-able device!

Community action has helped improve the experience of the sermon delivery buy going Social. The Jemaah can now leave comments on each Khutbah, post a message on the Khutbah wall, upload a short video clip of the Khutbah and post relevant links on the Facebook page! The Jemaah can also now share the khutbah easily over Facebook and Twitter.

Since Facebook Notes data is open, I’ve added Fadzuli, Shahib and Rozmail as the Facebook Page’s admins. They would then be able to use the RSS feeds and Facebook Open Data like status message, photos or wall posts and syndicate or turn it into an independent fantastic service on their own Islamic-based portals.

So what is Khutbah FB and Twitter? It’s the Khutbah going Social. It’s Khutbah 2.0!