SocialEngine 4.0 was released earlier this month, and its new Software Development Kit (SDK) is also out.
Next out is the SE3 to SE4 upgrade script. Charlotte Genevier at Webligo tells me that it should be out in a couple of weeks. Given that 4.0 is a complete redesign and restructuring of the previous versions, it’s a pretty complicated task.
Also in the works is an import script for people moving their social networks off of Ning and onto SocialEngine. This will manage the full export of Ning data that user get with an “account termination and export.”
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For many new social networks, an invitation-only approach makes a lot of sense.
Not only can you focus on developing the community and its interactions, but when properly done you can also create a real demand for invitations.
Now, Dribble, a social network where designers, developers and other creatives can share samples of their current work, is leveraging that perceived value of an invitation to raise money for charity.
Dribble users are raffling off 25 invitations to Dribble to raise $5,000 for mycharity: water. That puts the value of a single invite at $200!
All for a good cause, while generating good will, media coverage, and even more interest in getting in the door.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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 Curverider, the company behind the Elgg open source social networking software, will begin sending beta invites for their hosted social networking service, Elgg.com, on June 14th.
This is a paid service, with monthly subscriptions start at $29.95, competing head-to-head with Ning.
Unlike Ning, Elgg.com will feature a full export tool, letting site owners who want to eventually move to a self-hosted solution using the open-source version of Elgg to export content as well as members.
“We’ve listened to the privacy and data ownership concerns that are rife in the industry and have developed Elgg.com to address them,” says Dave Tosh, co-founder of Elgg. “Network owners can export all their data at any time at the click of a button. This gives them the ultimate flexibility: if they decide to bring the whole network in-house, they can export the data to their servers, download the open source Elgg software for free at Elgg.org and they’re good to go.”
This means for the first time that entrepreneurs creating social networks can start with a hosted solution — saving development headaches and costs — and then switch to self-hosted once they reach critical mass, all without losing content.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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Facebook gets a lot of grief for their privacy gaffes, and for the clumsy way of rolling out new features that impact privacy, but they are also an important model to understand for any social networking site dealing with their own privacy policies and privacy settings.
This is obvious when you look at this great piece in the NYTimes on The Price of Facebook Privacy. Facebook’s newest Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long, longer than the US Constitution. The accompanying infographic displays the 50 settings with more than 170 options user have to navigate.
With Facebook pushing the limits on distributing information, nearly every type of content in your profile has its own controls. So instead of saying all photo albums are private or public (which could cut off huge amounts of information, and the information sharing that fuels Facebook), users have granular control over individual albums. Some you want to share with family, some you really don’t.
As you sit down to map out the privacy policy and settings for your own social networking site, you will be balancing your desire to have people share (which drives interaction and engagement) with their desire to control who sees what. While yours may not be as intricate as Facebook’s privacy controls, keep in mind that they will have set your users’ expectations about the level of control they have over their information.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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After revealing that it was cutting off free networks a few weeks ago, Ning has finally announced its new pricing model, which kicks off in July.
Bottom Line: It’ll now cost you $200 a year to host a basic network on their service under the “Ning Plus” name. The cheaper version — at $20 a year — caps off members at 150, so is not useful for any serious community.
But even the $200 version is limited to 10 GB of storage, or “about 5,000 uploaded photos.”
The higher-end version goes for $500, but the storage only bumps up to “20 GB + upgrade.” It’s unclear what +upgrade means, but I suspect it will be a metering program, which will ding you for storage costs above 20 GB.
And if this is an offer you can refuse?
“When we launch the new pricing plans in July, we will add an automated content export option to the manage page of each Ning Network. You will have 30 days after the launch to choose one of the three new plans or export your content.”
Ning is using the Atom syndicated format but doesn’t provide any information on the level of detail you’ll be able to export.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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As a follow-up to last week’s post about reputation-based filtering, there’s a entire book (and blog) on the subject of building reputation-based systems, including the pitfalls, best-practices, and more.
Social networks have the benefit of built-in reputation: If someone’s a friend, there’s implicit trust. If they are a friend of a friend (in the LinkedIn model), that trust gets extended.
But maintaining the quality of content, interaction, and focus around the core subject of the community takes work, and reputation-based systems — even simple ones like invite-only communities — may be a worthwhile consideration for some social networks.
(via kylebragger).
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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As millions of social network developers discovered last week when Ning pulled the plug on free networks, building a company around a single company’s free service has its risks.
If the company goes under, scraps its free service, or changes the rules of the game, you’re, well, Ninged.
So while I’m a big fan of Facebook Connect — and am intrigued by today’s new announcements — and the way niche social networks can leverage it to build traffic and ease the sign-up process, history suggests they’ve eventually go from friend to foe. (Anyone who’s had their app rejected by Apple’s App Store knows what it’s like to have court of appeal)
For that reason, among others, if you’re developing a niche social network, you need to pay attention to XAuth (and its cousin, OAuth).
Here’s how Read, Write, Web decribes how the two work together:
If you’re familiar with OAuth, you might be wondering what the difference is between that system of secure authentication and XAuth. Here’s one way to explain it: XAuth tells a webpage “this is where the site visitor does social networking.” Then, OAuth is the way the user logs in there, granting the site permission to access their info without seeing their password. In other words, XAuth tells you where to ask for OAuth from.
XAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web. That means these platforms can help website owners (like you) discover which social networks a visitor to your site uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network.
It’s like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network.
Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meeb are in. Facebook and Twitter (who have their proprietary versions) are staying home.
While relying on Facebook and Twitter are easier in the short-term, it’s good strategy to play both sides of this authentication battle so you don’t end up on the losing side.
Update: Facebook just announced that they are adopting OAuth 2.0
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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Just heard from Charlotte Genevier at SocialEngine that they are offering a $50 discount, good until the end of the month, to any displaced Ning customers looking to move to their platform.
The discount code is “ningmigrate”
She also tells me they are looking into building a Ning importer as soon as possible.
I expect this is the first of several moves as social network platform developers look to step in as Ning cuts so many networks loose.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
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Ning has just announced it will be shifting its focus and resources exclusively to paid networks, leaving millions of free social networks in the lurch.
“We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning,” new CEO Jason Rosenthal told staff.
No word yet on how much network creators will have to pay to stay on the service. John McDonald, vice-president of Advocacy at Ning says he’ll give creators more details within a couple of weeks.
The problem for networks is that the ability to “transition off of Ning” is limited. At best you can get member names and some basic profile information, but you will lose the rich content and interactions members have created. That’s the true price of free.
It will be interesting to see over the next couple of weeks how hard Ning tightens the screws on the free networks, and whether they make migration easier or demand payment to preserve content.
Meanwhile, I’m sure free alternatives to Ning will be making some noise.
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
Click here to learn more!
If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!
Click here to learn more!
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