Archiving Facebook Conversations – Safety in Youth Ministry
I have always given free reign to the volunteers to have Facebook and to connect with the youth in the youth group through Facebook. I have also encouraged them to try stay away from chatting on facebook because there was no way to archive the conversations that you have. I do my best to protect the volunteers and the youth when it comes to providing a safe environment for us to share in God’s love. I have written a post about protecting yourself when using Facebook and this is sort of an add on.
I have discovered a way to save facebook conversations to your computer. This would be helpful for many reasons, but the main one being that you can protect yourself from wrongful allegations regarding your conversations with youth. If a youth says you said something in facebook chat, you can pull an unedited script.
I am sure there are other ways to do it, but here is the way that I have discovered and will use.
You can archive all conversations through Facebook chat by connecting your Facebook account to an AIM account. If you do not know what AIM is, it is similar to Facebook chat except it’s it own little program. It is similar to MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger if you have used those before.
Here’s how you do it.
Download AIM
Go to http://products.aim.com/ and download AIM. You will need to set up a username and password. I would recommend using your own email account and not have them create one for you.
Set Up Facebook Chat
Once your window is open and you can see your buddy list on AIM, click on MENU, and click on SETTINGS. In your settings you will see a meny item called Facebook Chat. Go through the steps to connect your facebook account. By doing this, you are giving AIM rights to sign in to your Facebook account for the use you are suggesting. If you are worried about this, know that AIM is a product of AOL which has a strong reputation to uphold.
Set Up Archive
Within the same settings menu, you can click on IM Archives. In there you will need to check the box to Archive chats and IM’s. Then you can choose a place where these will be stored on your computer.
Test It Out!
You should now be able to see all your Facebook friends in the AIM window and you can start a conversation with them. What you will find is that the conversation will be held in both AIM and Facebook. You will want to do everything through AIM so that it documents it there. Test it out by having a conversation with someone. To see the archive, you just right click on the person you want to see and click on SHOW IM ARCHIVE.
If everything is working correctly, you will see something like this open up in your web browser. Some it is chopped off for space reasons and I have put red in spots that I wanted to remain private. But you get the idea.
Related posts:
