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!

In November 2007, Neil Montefiore, M1 CEO said it was in discussion with Apple to bring the iPhone to Singapore. While Singapore law prevents vendor lock-in, meaning that such a deal would only be for at most 6 months before the other mobile phone telcos get their Apple iPhones, the revolutionary iPhone on Singapore shores would catapult Apple into the mainstream ever further.

Although Macs are not very common in Singapore, the Mac community is a rapidly growing one and their followers are a passionate lot. Where mobile phone penetration is 99%, a sizeable bulk of iPhone purchases will definitely come from Mac users. But an increasing number of non-Mac users have ordered unlocked iPhones the past year from the US to get the greatest and the latest in mobile phone crazy Singapore.

I think that Apple should no longer look at Singapore as a small insignificant market. The take up of iPhones could spur non-Mac users towards the Mac and that would make Macs become more relevant in Singapore’s technological infrastructure. Macs in the homes and workplace could also improve our government as more and more government websites just fail to work on non-IE browsers due to our government’s over-reliance to Microsoft platforms.

While my view may be a little too optimistic, one cannot deny that the iPhone in Singapore, regardless of carrier, would gravitate virgin owners to the Mac, and thus make the Apple cult here a much more visible community.