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Easter is a little over a month away, and one of my big projects for this year is launching a special site for watching our Sunday morning messages live online. As part of this process, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out some inexpensive ways to spice up the viewing experience beyond just watching a video clip. Although I don’t claim to be a trailblazer in this arena, I thought you might be interested in a few of the tools I’m toying around with right now.

Twitter Integration via Juitter

Any time I need to add a dash of Twitter integration into a project, Juitter is normally the first tool I turn to. It works right on top of the jQuery JavaScript framework and is easily customizable for just about whatever you would want to use it for.

For this project, I’m using Juitter to seamlessly pull in the latest tweets about our church and update that list every 30 seconds or so. I’m also including a link above this list of tweets that will allow our users to quickly add their own tweet directly from their account about watching the live service. It all adds up to some nice interactivity that is totally free and pretty painless to implement.

Live Comment Stream through Facebook Connect

You may have seen this on CNN or another news site, but Facebook has a nifty free widget for Connect users that allows your visitors to interact with other visitors directly through their Facebook accounts. It’s called the “Live Stream Box,” and it takes only seconds to get up and running if your site is already integrated with Facebook Connect.

I plan on placing this and our Twitter feed (mentioned above) into a social media box directly below our live video stream; it’s looking to be another great value add since it combines powerful interactivity with a system that a huge chunk of our audience is already comfortable using. It’s hard to go wrong with that.

Live Comment Stream through JS-Kit Echo

I’m still on the fence with this one (due to the subscription fee and more complex integration), but the time I’ve spent messing around with it has been impressive so far. Echo combines all of the comments and social interactions taking place about your content into one easily-digestable feed. It’s definitely worth checking out if you have a similar project coming up.

Those are the three building blocks I’m looking into right now. Combined with the obvious stuff (links to contact information, online giving, etc), I’m hoping it will make for a positive experience for our online visitors.

Are you aware of any tools I should check out, or any ministries that are knocking it out of the park in this arena? Let me know in the comments below.