YouVersion

We love the community that’s been building in YouVersion over the past couple years. YouVersion was built so that people could experience the Bible in online communities, and YouVersion Groups is the next big step in seeing that dream come true. YouVersion Groups is, at its core, a simple way for you to find people and ideas to which you relate and begin to build the foundation for tight community interaction through an increasingly shared Bible experience.

Although “groups” is a commonplace concept in the social web, we decided to take a fresh look at how the Bible is currently shared in community, how we could build on that firm foundation, and bring that experience to the web in as natural a way as possible. Naturally, most shared Bible experiences happen in real-life groups (worship gatherings, Bible studies, support groups, etc.), so our first foray into this space is YouVersion Live, which will be connected to the Group you create.

Right now, the function of a Group is focused on the Live portion, but we have fun and useful things planned for this new piece of YouVersion.

We’re thrilled to introduce a brand new concept for YouVersion.com. It’s called YouVersion Live and it brings a new level of interaction to the communication of God’s truth and love.

YouVersion Live is a free service that will give pastors, conference speakers, teachers, and group leaders the ability to share content and real-time feedback on mobile devices during live events, services, and more. Here’s an idea of how a church leader could use YouVersion Live…

A pastor would love to be able to get his congregation more involved in his message, ask questions and get answers, survey the room with a simple poll, give them an easy and natural way to take notes on his talking points, and maybe even give them a follow-up thought with a blog post or YouTube video as they’re leaving. And, in a perfect world, they’d be able to keep all that information in a place they look every day so they can refresh themselves on what he spoke about.

YouVersion Live allows this pastor to do all this (and a little more) by simply dragging and dropping in a super-simple dashboard on YouVersion.com. During a service, his congregation will pull out their web-enabled phones, open up YouVersion (either on the mobile website or a native application), read the Bible, take notes, ask questions, submit prayer requests, answer polls, find links to external content (event details, blog posts, videos, etc), and give online. Before they leave, they can send all that great content to themselves (or a friend) via email for future reference.

With YouVersion Live, a pastor can offer his congregation a rich and engaging way to experience the Bible and his message. Plus, with millions of people already using YouVersion on their phones, he’s got a head start towards telling his congregation about this new tool.

The latest YouVersion update hit iTunes this afternoon, which was a sweet Friday surprise and a great way to kick off the weekend! Here’s what it means for you:

• Now you can tweet verses you’re reading directly from the Bible app with a shortened http://read.ly URL
• We’ll have some YouVersion Live goodness ready to share with you when we launch on Tuesday. (Don’t forget to check out the webinar if you haven’t seen it yet!)

To get these latest features, you’ll need to update to the latest version of YouVersion for the iPhone, which is Version 1.9. Unfortunately this means that afterwards you’ll need to re-download any offline versions you previously downloaded, but that shouldn’t be necessary when upgrading in the future because this update fixes several issues related to offline translations.

If you’ve never downloaded an offline translation, it’s pretty easy:

• Open the Bible app on your iPhone or iPod Touch (with a wifi connection) and go to the “More” tab.
• Tap “Settings,” then “Offline Translations,” then scroll to find the list of available offline translations.
• Once you’ve selected the translation, tap “Download.” The translation should begin downloading immediately. (You’ll see a bar showing you the progress of the download in real-time.)

Now that you have it downloaded to your device, you’ll be able to read the Bible anytime as long as you have your downloaded translation selected. It’s perfect for reading the Bible in remote areas with no connection or on airplanes while traveling.

We can’t wait to share YouVersion Live with you next week!