Great news from the folks at SocialEngine, who just announced that they will provide a free upgrade to the upcoming 4.0 release to all  clients with current 3.x licenses!

The beta demo should be launched within 4-6 weeks.  Looks like a pretty substantial overhaul to the base code.

Here is a partial tentative feature list for SE4:

- Improved activity feed with member photos, in-feed posting and comments
- HTML4 standards-compliant layout for increased accessibility
- Built-in profile picture cropping tool
- Automatic detection of locale & date/time from member’s browser
- Users can belong to multiple networks (i.e. sub-networks)
- Members can search for each other geographically
- Completely renovated DB structure, improving scalability for large installs
- Layout can now be modified with drag & drop simplicity
- Widgets can easily be added or removed from the admin panel
- Vastly improved front and back-end modularity, making third-party development much easier
- Third-party plugins can now easily add custom pages to the signup process
- Comprehensive API
- More script/template granularity, designed to ease customizations and minimize conflicts
- Streamlined upgrade process for platform and plugins
- Admin can now broadcast a message to all users at once
- Admin can post announcements above the news feed
- Pre-populated location-type profile fields now available (State, Country, ZIP)
- Removed constraint on maximum number of profile fields