President Gordon B. Hinckley, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints died this evening. He had been defying his age (97 years old) for quite some time. He will be sorely missed by millions around the world. He will definitely be missed here! According to news reports, he died at about 7 p.m. this evening (Sunday, January 27, 2007). At 8:14 p.m. the first tweet came across on Twitter from @JesseStay. KSL.com had the news up at about 8 p.m. but newsroom.lds.org didn’t have the information up until 8:45 p.m. Literally as soon as the first news was reported, it went across the world on Twitter. That’s one of the astounding powers of this new communications medium.

A few minutes later, BreakingNewsOn reported via Twitter that Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Greek Orthodox Church died this evening. Church news across the globe being reported first on Twitter. I have a Facebook page: http://profile.to/rolandsmith/. A short time ago I got an invite on Facebook to join the President Gordon B. Hinckley Virtual Memorial event (you may have to have a Facebook page to see this profile). It’s amazing to me how quickly more than 200 people had joined the event with hundreds of invitations out. This is the new media at its best.