Webligo, the company behind SocialEngine and the upcoming Advious, began when Alex Benzer and Charlotte Genevier met at Pasadena Polytechnic high school in 2002. The two quickly became friends and began programming together.

As they were putting the finishing touches on the SocialEngine v4.0 beta last month, Charlotte took some time to answer my questions about SocialEngine, Advious, and her advice for people starting social networks.

SocialEngine wasn’t your first product. What gave you the idea to work on a social networking program?

Prior to SocialEngine, Alex and I created BlogHoster, a community-building platform designed to emulate LiveJournal and Blogger. At the time, Facebook and MySpace had gained quite a bit of momentum, and we realized that we could apply the same model to social networking.

BlogHoster was acquired just before the very successful release of SocialEngine in June 2007. Since then, we’ve continued improving SocialEngine based on client feedback and market trends.

To date, we’ve helped create over 3500 social networks with SocialEngine, and that number continues to rise every day.

Of those, how many would you say are actually, working sites?

Because of our white-label model, it’s difficult for us to keep exact tabs on how all our clients’ networks are doing, but we estimate that at least 50% of our clients are active.

Can you share a few sites who you think have done a great job building up their community?

One of my favorite implementations is SkinPoison – their design is beautiful and their niche community is a great example of SocialEngine at its best.

Another fantastic implementation is at SmartlyGreen.com. They’ve integrated SocialEngine into their active, earth-friendly shopping community. For a number of other fantastic examples of SocialEngine in action, check out our showcase.

What trends are you seeing in the features your customers are demanding?

Our customers consistently want to emulate the innovations rolled out by the big social network players. When Facebook releases a new feature, we usually see an abrupt influx of requests for that feature.

However, our team always considers these requests critically since features deployed on huge social networks like Facebook don’t always translate well to smaller niche networks.

With the version 4 release, we are placing a major emphasis on the timeliness of user-generated content. We plan to make the user experience more focused on the stream by enabling users to post content like links, photos, videos, and polls directly into the stream. Users can then “like” or comment on items in the stream, creating an ongoing dialogue around the content.

Over the last year, Facebook slowly implemented this format; some like to refer to this as Facebook’s “Twitterification.” While only a few customers have explicitly requested this subtle structural change, our team strongly believes that our customers will need it to strengthen their engagement with users.

There are lots of solutions for people looking to build social networks, from fully-hosted ones like Ning to self-hosted, white-labeled like SocialEngine, to enterprise level custom installs and even open source, like elgg: What makes SocialEngine stand out? Who is your market?

SocialEngine is currently positioned for the middle market in the white-label space. This ranges from individuals that want something more customizable and brandable than Ning and have a small budget to pay for it, to small and mid-sized organizations that want a thoroughly branded social network (or internal network) with very specific functionality that they can add themselves or with the aid of a third party.

Ownership is a huge value point for SocialEngine customers. Services like Ning do not offer customers the benefit of owning their user data, which is arguably the underlying core asset of any social network.

Also, we consider any additions or modifications to our source code to be owned by the customer. SocialEngine is one of very few options for inexpensively building and owning a social network; among those options, we think our platform looks and works the best.

You’ve developed a great community of plug-in developers around SocialEngine. How do you balance things when what was once a plug-in becomes something your customers start demanding as a core feature?

First, we have to make an assessment about whether the feature being requested should be a part of the core. Is it something that the majority of our clients need and want? Or is it a very specialized request that will only appeal to a tiny fraction of our customers?

Once we’ve determined that it should be a part of the core, we figure out how much time it will take for us to add the feature. Sometimes we’ll offer to acquire an existing third-party plugin or mod to incorporate into our product – other times, we’ll simply code it ourselves.

We really appreciate the third-party developer community and the value they bring to our customers. Within the next couple of months, we are planning a few changes that will help foster and grow that community even more.

What’s the future of social networking, in your eyes.

The main function of a web-based social network is to serve people information that they find relevant, interesting and trustworthy, and to build relationships in the process. Right now, various barriers stand in the way.

Innovators in the field are experimenting with ways to eliminate these barriers mainly by leveraging new technology and rethinking how information is filtered and delivered.

As the field evolves, we think these barriers will be reduced until users are finally served the most relevant content and make the personal connections that most enrich their lives.

Your newest product, Advious, is currently in private alpha. It’s billed as a project focused on improving social advertising. Can you share anything else?

We’ve noticed that many of the hundreds of thousands of smaller, niche social networks out there try to monetize with Google Adsense. While Adsense is a very popular and effective way to monetize content in many cases, we think it fails in some ways when used within a social context.

Advious will take a different approach to targeting ads on socially-layered sites by putting more emphasis on users’ self-reported demographics (i.e. their profile information).

We think this approach will improve performance particularly for the long tail of smaller social networks, and we plan to launch our network by offering it to our SocialEngine customers.

Safe to assume it will work seamlessly with SocialEngine?

Absolutely! When it’s ready, we’re hoping our SocialEngine clients will be interested in being beta testers!

There are several revenue streams social networks are pursuing. Is this a sign that you feel advertising offers the best business model for social networks?

Not necessarily. Advertising is definitely one of the proven methods for monetizing a social network, but it is by no means the only way. However, we do feel that advertising on social networks isn’t as good as it could be – that’s a problem we’re hoping to solve!

Will you be offering any other features to support other revenue streams (gifts, sponsored pages or groups, etc)?

For the moment, gifts and sponsored pages/groups aren’t included in SocialEngine by default, but there are several third-party-developed mods and plugins that add this functionality.

Another potential revenue stream that we may support in the future is a subscription-based model, wherein users pay for the right to be a member of the network. These are features we are very seriously considering adding in the future, once version 4 is released and stable.

What three pieces of advice would you give someone looking to start a social networking site?

My first piece of advice would be to focus on a specialized niche group. The more specific you get, the more likely you’ll be to attract like-minded people to your community. Your early adopters will be so happy to have a place to discuss their common interests that they’ll interact and generate a lot of user content, which will in turn attract more users.

My second piece of advice is to make the users and the content they generate the focus of your network. It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting more features, widgets, games, and apps for your users to play with, but content and interaction will be what brings those users back to your site.

My last piece of advice is to do your homework. Research your options when it comes to which platform you use to start your site, and select the one that best fits your needs. When selecting a developer or designer to customize that platform, make sure that you get references and look at a portfolio. If the developer isn’t respectful, or if you suspect that they’re not reliable, or if what they’re offering sounds too good to be true, trust your instincts and keep looking.

But the flip side of this advice is not to get so caught up in the details that you never get started. If you spend so much time looking for the perfect platform or the best developer, you may never get your site up!