A few years ago the founder of eHarmony realized he could make serous money with his site and left Focus on the Family to work on his mission, and let’s not mince words, he is making a lot of money.

The founders of companies such as eHarmony.com, the online dating service, and others, such as Fastclick.com and OptionsXpress.com, are selling stakes in their firms for cash. Because the sales add capital, not only to the firm’s coffers, but also to the pockets of the founders, these transactions are called founder sales in the technology-investment trade. via: Dating Blog

Salon has an informative article on the founder of eHarmony. The dating/matching site  has risen to one of the top five dating/mating sites on the internet. Neil Warren has a PhD and was a professor and Dean at Fuller until he started eHarmony with his son. They launched in 2000, and know of 10 thousand documented marriages between people that used his site, based on his compatibility system. 
It costs between 30 to 250 dollars US to use eHarmony, and last year’s figures show it to be worth about 110 million dollars. Warren is spending a lot of advertising dollars to move eHarmony’s image away from the Focus on the Family shadow.

You may not be ready to look for your life long partner. But not to worry, someone has stepped in to fill the gap - calling themselves a MySpace alternative for Christians.
(MySpace is owned by  Rupert Murdoch’s media company (Fox) and registered 28 million visitors in December)

Xianz - Trademarked even

Hey. Someone made this stuff up! So, this was inevitable - a social networking site targeted at  young  religious/churched people (read evangelical) with some disposable income for the membership fee. And it’s really called Xianz. (TM)

The MySpace alternative for Christians! It’s invite only!

I sat on the front of the site for a few minutes watching the ‘real time chat.’ The conversations are about the level you’d see on IM, this for-a-fee clubbing-for-evangelicals-gated-site offers more.

It probably looks good to nervous parents, offering them  a sense of security because since you gotta pay to play, so it’s safe, right? It’s cheaper than forking out for real life events.  
It’s 11 pm, do you know where your kids are?
The computer has become the subtitute for the TV babsitter, since kids are growing up multi tasking now. 
All the words in the pitch sound real Christian without being over the top.

There is financial incentive to bring others over.

• Unique affiliate link for each member
• Support for Tier 1 and tier 2
• Support for recurring commissions
• Displays affiliate account stats overview
• Shows affiliate commission details including amount earn and date
• Members can withdraw affiliate earnings via paypal

I’ll be fair and acknowledge that social networking and peer chatter is critical, and social isolation is a problem in our busy world; but I’m going to be unfair and say it is also lucrative and this will probably work because you have to pay, which adds to the sense of culture war and fosters the isolation certain religious communities thrive on.
Given the free technology available, faith communities don’t need to be charging for being righteous MySpace wannabes.

If it is just the right kind of ‘cool’, parents will fork out to have their teens social network on a site that looks and says all the right things. 

It is run by a group (or entreprenuer) called Christian Social Fellowshipping - that’s nice. Sounds proper.  I guess that means we’ll be seeing more MySpace, Friendster and Facebook sites social networks for the faithful spring up - for a fee.

When I started blogging in Australia, before I started BDBO, I noticed a church URL in Martin Roth’s log so I headed over. It was a genuine church site, and the ‘pastor’ wrote a long rant about the evils of blogging, warning his parishoners to stay away. It was funny/sad for me to read, he was  serious and vehement about  the wickedness of the openess of blogging and associating/reading those people.

I’m not going to be vehement about what someone jokingly said ‘ not MySpace it’s His Space,’ the sad thing is the market is there, the fear is there, the money is there, the self-righteousness is there, all offered up as healthy alternatives.
Sooner than later, the difficulties any social networking site deals with will also be there. Technology is only an extention of real life, and people are going to be hurt.

Xianz ™ - code of conduct  There are only 18 rules, I guess it could be worse, it reminded me of private school. This one caught my attention, just what teens need - more advertising:

13. Email and Newsletters. From time to time, based upon your Xianz membership and specified interests, we will be sending out email and advertisements to your email. We will not sell or rent your email address to any other companies.

This site is slick and ads are running, so of course they reserve the right to email members with more ads… (arrghh) I’d better stop while I’m ahead.

via: Tall Skinny Kiwi

 Update:  The er, competition - BrotherFish over at Swordwalk isn’t quite as nuanced with the religious words directed at scared parents in the hope their money will fly out of their wallets.

We all know privacy is a big thing on the net, and an especially big concern for parents over their kids. BrotherFish would operate much like Facebook.com in that it would be by invitation only. Meaning to join you have to be invited by someone already signed up in your church. This greatly reduces the chances of predators and other ‘trouble-makers’ getting into your groups, this is huge issue with sites like MySpace.com.

Update 2: (2/4/06) Is Xianz. com (TM) owned by Canadians? Site admin is Robbie D, a 34 year old male from Alberta. A couple of other males in that age group and time online are also Albertans. Is there a connection to the Praize.com portal? (other than trying to be cute with the spelling) 
The Financial Times reports that MySpace has been doing some cleaning and tidying - removing two hundred thousand profiles.

Update: (26/04/06)  Oaktree.Org is launching with similar goals.
Associated Baptist Press on Christian social network sites