imran*

Tarique and I have been plotting service ideas for Believr for several months and with a lot of our family and friends now happily ensconced in Twitter and Facebook…we’re starting to think about how we can bring Believr to users in those services…

Twitter Lingo is partially created by the user community. The D command for direct mesages was part of the official command vocabulary, but we’ve seen users very rapidly define and adopt @ for replies and L to signal your current location.

Tarique and I are gonna suggest (* to signal when you’re praying, followed by the name of one of the five daily or optional prayers for Muslims. For example…

• (* fajr
• (* zohr
• (* asr
• (* maghrib
• (* isha
• (* tahajjud

We’ll be sampiing (* from Twitter’s public timeline and attempting to visualise the results – by user, location and time where we can – over the coming days and weeks. It’ll be wonderful to see real time Islamic serendipity unfold…I’d love to get my friends at Stamen or Poly9 to plot the waves of prayer moving across the globe, following the path of the Sun, centered on Mecca 🙂

This kinda fulfils some of our aspirations for Believr, using Muslims’ relationships to help remind themselves, and each other, of their spiritual and human responsibilities. Islamic prayer is one of the Five Pillars that underpin our faith and the cohesion of the Muslim community; by helping people pray, we hope we’re making the world a better place 🙂

UPDATE: It’s kinda catchin’ (slooooowly)…crimsonsilk was the first user to jump in, followed by mohsin, ush and jumpy.