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More Free Bible Apps

At YouVersion, we love The Bible. That’s why we developed The Bible App. It’s amazing how God can speak to us through His Word when we begin to make it a part of our everyday lives.

We’re passionate about The Bible App, but we’re passionate about it because we’re passionate about The Bible. Of course, YouVersion is just one way you can engage with God’s Word. We’re grateful to live in such an amazing time, when so many passionate people are building great tools and resources around the Bible. You can find so many great mobile applications or websites that will help you read and study The Bible. Several of them make a great complement to The Bible App. We want to make sure you know about as many of these as possible. So we’ve added a page to YouVersion.com where we can highlight for you some of the great options that you have available.

While we’d love for you to try The Bible App (which is completely free), most of all, we just want to help you connect with the Bible. Happy reading!

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YouVersion for the Web: “Notes” Now!

During our webcast this past Tuesday, one great question submitted through Twitter was, “When will we be able to take notes?” Terry Storch, our Digerati Pastor, answered that we planned to roll notes out on Friday. Happy Friday, everybody… Notes are here now!

What notes are. You can use notes to collect your thoughts, keep track of what God’s Spirit is saying to you, and even to share your insights and ideas with your friends. You can associate a note directly with a verse or passage (sort of like a bookmark with context), or you can just record your thoughts generally. As long as you’re signed in to your YouVersion account, your notes go where you go.

Notes come in two flavors:

  • Public. When you create a new note, its default setting is public. This means that anyone will be able to see it.
  • Private. You can mark any note as private at any time. That means no one can see it but you.

TIP: You can change a note back and forth between private and public at any time.

Start now. To add a note, just click the big Create New button and fill in the blanks. (Be sure to specify whether you want your note to be Private or Public.) Looking at an existing note is easy: Just click on it. Click Back to return to the list, or click the arrow buttons to scroll backwards and forwards through notes.

We’ll continue to refine the notes feature as we gain insight from how YouVersion users interact with it…and remember, notes will be rolling out to all our major mobile apps as well, so look for an update to your Bible App soon!

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You’ve Been Busy This Week!

Wow, it’s been quite a week for the YouVersion community! Our announcement that you’ve downloaded the Bible App on more than 10 million devices made a big splash with major headlines—here are just a few:

Then, so many of you showed up at the YouVersion Webcast that we were a trending topic in the U.S. on Twitter! If you missed it, you can catch the webcast in this post.

And in case you haven’t had a chance to get a good look at it yet, we wanted to share an infographic that gives you a little more insight into the 3.5+ billion minutes you’ve spent engaging with the Bible on YouVersion. (view below)

Thanks a million (or make that 10+ million) for all you’re doing to creatively use and share the Bible App. We can’t wait to see how God works through you in this next season to help more and more people fall in love with His word.

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Miss Yesterday’s Webcast? Watch it Here.

Yesterday was a blast! We were honored to have thousands of people watching the webcast together (actual viewership stats coming soon) and excited to see the hashtag for the event (#yvwebcast) become a trending topic in the US. Our Facebook page was lighting up as well.

During the webcast you heard about several opportunities for you to be involved in what Bobby calls “a revolution of Bible engagement” around the world. Here’s a recap of those opportunities:

Thanks to everyone who spent time with us yesterday and to all of you who shared about the event with your friends. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:20-21

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1 Billion Minutes: How You Can Take Part

During today’s special webcast, we shared exciting news about the Bible App’s recent milestones and about YouVersion’s future. So far, the Bible App has been downloaded more than 10 million times and people have used YouVersion to read the Bible for 3.5 billion minutes!

And as amazing as it is to see what God has done in the past 2.5 years, we’re confident that He wants to do much, much more to help people make the Bible a daily part of their lives. So today we introduced a crazy, God-sized goal:

1 billion minutes reading the Bible in 1 month

During January alone, we hope to see users spend at least 1 billion minutes reading the Bible. Because, after all, that’s really what YouVersion is all about: falling in love with God’s Word.

It’s only because of you, our user community, that YouVersion and the Bible app are where they are today. And we’ll need your help again to reach one billion minutes in one month. Here are just a few of the things you can do to help make it happen:

  • Rate us. If you haven’t done so already, please rate the YouVersion Bible app in iTunes (honestly, the sooner, the better).
  • Vote for us. Vote for us in the 4th Annual Mashable Awards.
  • Assist your friends. Help friends install the Bible app on their phones and other devices.
  • Share with your community. Mention @YouVersion in some tweets and Facebook status updates, and encourage your friends to download it to their devices. (It’s available for download on iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, and webOS in their respective app stores and marketplaces.)
  • Write about us. If you have a blog, please consider writing at least one post to let your readers know what we’re doing and ask them to participate.
  • Share the Bible on Christmas Day. You’ll be hearing more about this soon, but it will be a great opportunity to point people to the birth of Christ.
  • Consider serving on the YouVersion team in one of the many different positions that are available: proofreading, user support, app testing, design, development, and more. Sign up here.

If you could focus your efforts between now and Christmas, that’s the window where we have the opportunity to make the biggest impact. Stay tuned to the YouVersion Facebook page or Twitter feed to keep up with the latest.

We can do this! But only together. Let’s see what can happen when a passionate community of users works together to help people everywhere spend more time than ever in God’s Word.