If you are starting a social networking site, it can be tempting to take advantage of the power of third-party APIs to build your membership.
That’s the approach taken by The Whuffie Bank, and intriguing effort to measure online reputation. Using publicly-available profiles from Twitter and Facebook, they track your public activity on social networks and analyze your online “reputation.”
Neat idea, but lousy execution.
They claim “6,023,053″accounts on their home page, but it seems most people are surprised — and many angry — when they discover their accounts have already been created for them. Back in the day, we used to call this scraping.
The Whuffie Bank is all about online reputation, yet they are creating a poor reputation for themselves by scraping profiles without asking, or at least inviting, and then hiding behind fine print when people ask their profile be removed.
There’s no way to delete your account, and when users complain on their site, they’re reminded “the information that we use is of public domain and you agreed to this point when signing up for Twitter.”
Wow. Thanks for playing…
I get their point: My Twitter profile is public, and maybe in their fine print it’s legal, but that’s no way to build your own reputation. A lot of things are public, but to pull them into a new site without warning, and to create an “account” on someone’s behalf (which implies cooperation) is going to far, in my opinion.
 Well, something's in the air... They say they’re developing a delete function, but for now users will have to put up with it.
The irony is that they’re pulling in any mentions of their name from Twitter (screencap on the left), and judging from random comments, their own online reputation is starting to suck.
 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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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.
Continue Reading »
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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It’s crucial that you fully understand the software platform that you are using to host your social networking site, and never just assume it’s secure. For example, regardless of which platform you use to run your site, you need to be aware of a common security fault: User profiles stored in a database with plain text passwords.
RockYou , the social network app maker, discovered this recently when a hacker gained access to its 32 million user accounts–including unencrypted passwords and email addresses. Since many (if not most) people rely on a single password for multiple sites, having this information puts their users’ in harm’s way.
Well-designed community platforms won’t make this rookie mistake. Most will rely on password hashing. This means encrypting a member’s chosen password before it’s stored in your database. When they log in, the password they supply is encrypted again using the same “hash code” and compared to the stored value.
This way, if someone gets access to your database, they will not be able to get hold of you member’s passwords.
Given the funding and resources RockYou had to rely on, this is a surprising mistake, and one any social networking site needs to guard against.
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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Google has announced that users will now be able to join any of the nine million sites that use Google Friend Connect with their Twitter login. That’s great for users: one more quick and simple way to join sites without having to re-enter all of their information, choose a new password, etc.
The bonus for site owners is that once the person has signed in with their Twitter account, they can easily tweet about your site, share discussions from the comments gadget, and invite their own friends to your site via Twitter.
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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Privacy is one of the most important issues facing social networking sites.
Without a clear and consistent privacy policy that matches the reality of your site, and the tools to let your members control their privacy, it will be hard to build the trust needed for a healthy community.
If you’ve ever come across most online privacy policies, though, you know that they are anything but clear. Facebook’s policy comes in at over 5,000 words, and that’s after considerable push back from members and regulators to make it simpler and more transparent.
When crafting your privacy policy, you need to find a balance between form and function. If it’s unreadable legalese, you’re not making it easy for your members to trust you.
Some advice: Don’t go to a lawyer and get them to write it for you.
You need to set your policy and make those decisions yourself. Sure, get a lawyer to vet it, but you should be driving your site’s policies.
Also make sure you understand how your platform functions, and the impact third-party services (like Google Analytics) will have on your policy.
Some of the questions you need to be able to answer:
What data will you collect, and how will you:
Share that data
Sell that data
Contact members with that data
Aggregate that data
There are plenty of free privacy policy “generators” out there, but they aren’t a substitute for making your own decisions, or making your own policy as clear as you can.
There’s a movement toward making privacy policies easier to understand
CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS), out of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, suggests presenting privacy policies in a similar, consistent and graphic way as those ubiquitous nutritional information labels that are on everything in the supermarket (example at right).
Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, points to the way Creative Commons reduced the complexity of letting others use your work with a set of simple icons and accompanying text as an example of how privacy policies can be made more user-friendly.
Social networks need to take this one step further. Not only does your privacy policy need to set out what information you collect and what you do with it. But you also need to make it absolutely clear to members who will see their profile (or parts of it) and who will see their activity (or aspects of it).
Think of these as Privacy Settings.
They should outline exactly who will:
See their profile
See their actions
See their content
See their connections
The controls for these settings need to be as clear as possible. If you have examples of social networking sites that have nailed the communication of their privacy policies and settings, please leave a comment.
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!
 I recently did a great interview with Efe Cakarel, founder of The Auteurs, and wanted to share an insight he had.
“As we near the end of the 2000s, people are creating more and more “Best of the Decade” lists. It really came home to us how important keeping track of and ranking your favorite films is to people, how much that says about who you are and what you like, and what is important to you. “
Until now, members had been posting their lists in the site’s forum. To give members the tools to really get engaged with lists, The Auteurs just introduced a new purpose-built list feature.
A week after it launched, the List feature is having a measurable impact on member engagement and repeat traffic.
This is a great strategy that can work for almost any niche social networking site, and since it’s subjective and personal, it’s a great way of sparking discussion, comparison and even a little heat!
As we come to the end of a year AND the end of a decade, how are you letting your members tap into this natural response to start listing, ranking, and categorizing?
(Lists, by the way, are also handy “hooks” that can be used in a media release to generate even more PR for your site…)
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!
Mashable’s Josh Catone highlights a brilliant use of Facebook Connect.
One site that used Facebook Connect to great advantage is GirlsGuideTo, a social network that’s only for 20-something women.
Normally, there’s no way on ensuring that all members of a “closed” network like that actually fit the criteria. If the gate keeping is compromised, then so is the feeling of community and respect that networking sites rely on.
That’s where Facebook Connect comes in. The only way to join GirlsGuideTo is through Facebook Connect.
Since the most people use real information in their Facebook profiles, GirlsGuideTo is able to determine the gender of people trying to join the site.
Women get in, and men are invited to leave information to be notified about the “Guy’s Corner” that is under development.
10 Impressive New Implementations of Facebook Connect.
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!
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
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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