If you thought taking prayer requests via e-mail made things easy for your congregation, you've got nothing on Alon Nil. The 25-year-old from Tel Aviv, Israel, recently launched a non-profit service that allows people around the world to place their prayers in Jerusalem's Western Wall-via Twitter.
Nil created the service, which is available to people of all faiths, as a way to connect people with the Jewish culture. Using the Twitter account @thekotel, individuals can tweet a prayer (no more than 140 characters, of course), which Nil will print out on a small piece of paper and stuff in the cracks of the prayer site-also known as the Kotel and believed to be the place closest to the Holy of Holies in the second temple.
"I don't see the project as something religious but as something cultural with an affiliation to Judaism," Nil says. "I thought of it after understanding Twitter's power and wondered what I could do with it. I wanted to do something to help Israel, so I linked the Western Wall to the millions using Twitter." [haaretz.com]