Southern Gospel News SGNScoops Digital

(Nashville, TN) – As Facebook and MySpace continue to vie for the number one and number two positions as the top social networking sites on the web, a newcomer to the social network crowd has quietly combined the best features of both Facebook and MySpace as well as incorporating Twitter applications. But MyBLAB.com has an even greater mission in mind than becoming a social networking empire.

“Honestly, MyBLAB.com started out as a social networking site to compete with Facebook and MySpace,” says co-founder Chris Burkhart. “But I really began to become convicted by God to make it into a worldwide community for Christians. I didn’t want to just add more ‘noise’ to the internet. I wanted the network to bring something positive into people’s lives. I grew up in the church as a preacher’s kid and I had the strong desire to create a worldwide community for believers to interact with each other, encourage each other and just ‘have church’ online.”

MyBLAB.com (acronym for “Be Linked as Believers”) is a non-apologetic, targeted community structured to bring Christians and organizational ministries from every denomination and every part of the world together online. Burkhart spent over three years and literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code to develop a site that has all the functionality of the most popular social networks, yet offers a safe and contained environment for people who profess the Christian faith.

“MyBLAB.com doesn’t have all the unnecessary clutter in it,” Burkhart explains. “We wanted to make the content all about the users – the community. Other networks are secular meeting places, but we wanted MyBLAB.com to be a safer place.”

So are non-Christians barred from the site? Absolutely not, says Burkhart. Like a church, his vision is for MyBLAB to become a community where people who are interested in the Christian faith can come and find answers to their spiritual questions. Ultimately, Burkhart sees the site becoming a valuable resource to connect people with churches in their area or Christian-based organizations that can help them with both their spiritual and practical needs such as dealing with addictions, pregnancy care, or other problems they may be facing.

Burkhart says the applications in MyBLAB.com are fast, scalable, reliable, and feature-rich. Because the site is new, joining MyBLAB.com now allows individuals or organizations to grab simple and personalized URLs, something almost impossible to do at this juncture with any other social networking site. Plus, music lovers and video fanatics can load their profiles with great Christian music and videos. Christian artists can promote and share their music by uploading songs to their profile page. And like other social networks, MyBLAB.com is completely free to use.

“The vision for MyBLAB.com is to form a community of believers across the globe, encouraging one another in their journeys of faith,” says Burkhart. “I can’t think of a better way to use the internet than that.”