SocialGO Blog

Following on from the introduction of the brand new Admin Center, we’d like to show you the new ‘Member Billing’ feature!

Using SocialGO and PayPal you’ll be able to enable membership subscriptions to your network. You can set payments as optional or make them required for sign-up to your network. If you make them required, their account will not be activated until we receive an IPN response from PayPal, which notifies us that the payment has gone through.

You’ll be able to charge members in US Dollars, Euros or Pounds Sterling, and make the payment a one-off upon sign-up to your network, or a repeating subscriptions variable by days, weeks, months or even years!

All payments will be taken from your SocialGO network by PayPal, and using the exciting new ‘Member Management’ feature, you’ll be able to see which members have paid and who hasn’t, and then communicate with them and/or impose certain restrictions of your choice!

This will be available for everyone for free initially and then, with the launch of premium features will be $19.99 per month.  We plan to be developing this offering over the next few months to support more payment providers and additional options for network owners. As always your feedback will play an important part in the ongoing development of our service so let us know what you think once you have had a play with it.

We have been very busy at SocialGO over the last few weeks putting the finishing touches on the the all new Admin Center, which will available within the next few weeks.  The new Admin Center features a complete revamp of the interface and loads of great new features.

The new admin center has a beautiful new interface, more logical categories and a few surpises. The whole system is more concise and organised to make it much quicker for you to organise your network. For example, the Profile Question section has changed beyond recognition :

We will be posting up a link to this in the next few days including access to the Member Manager AND Member Billing system.

More screenshots after the jump.

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TrikePilot (http://trikepilot.socialgo.com) was set up by a microlight, or ‘trike’ enthusiast. He had an existing community on a networking site, but found SocialGO offered many features he was missing, so invited all his members to sign-up to his new, improved network.

Flying trikes is a very niche hobby with enthusiasts all over the world that love to communicate, share experiences, photos and videos about there passion for flying.  As they have a very broad age range it was important for the network creator to provide a network that would easily allow members of all ages and experience to communicate with each other.  With SocialGO, he was able to provide a place for users to upload videos of their flights, take-offs and general flying experiences, and more importantly, users were able to tag their videos, so they’re really easily found by other members.

With over 300 users, the TrikePilot magazine has also become very active, with users sharing news, stories and experiences with other members.  The Groups tool has proved to be really useful too, in helping members with specific similarities come together, or to form groups of members in certain geographic areas, and the powerful ‘Advanced Search’ feature has been useful in finding nearby enthusiasts too!

Spencer, the owner of TrikePilot said ”All of the things that we need to build a custom social network site are already standard at SocialGO.  There is loads of great functionality that will connect my members all over the world.  We are also looking at selling advertising to suppliers of the trike pilot industry and expect to be making money soon from the network.”

We are preparing for the upcoming roll-out of our third party program (Yay!). This will allow developers to create widgets and applications on the SocialGO service and make them available for network owners to add through the new admin interface.

In addition we are gradually expanding our API’s to include additional methods to support media, groups and forums to allow developers to do more with our platform.

We are therefore looking to hear from anyone interested in developing for SocialGO. We want to hear about your ideas, things you would like to use SocialGO for and how we can help you to get going! Please complete the form below and give us more information as to how you would like to work with us.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pX3kdDL18gkqTDeuZoz1KWw&hl=en_GB

Our flagship third-party partner is WidgetLaboratory.com who have great experience in adding value to niche social networking websites and we are glad to have them on board. We are working with Spencer and his team to create the first set of widgets whilst we structure and develop our API and app store. The WidgetLabs team are totally seperate from SocialGO and we are just glad to be able to provide a home for their creativity and energy.

CreditCrunched (http://creditcrunched.org) shows just how creative you can be with the SocialGO software. The network was created by an ex-employee of Lehman Brothers, who wanted to provide an online resource for all the banking staff affected by the recent financial turbulence. 

The network already has a really active user base, who are using the forum and the blog to share experiences, lend advice and to discuss topical pieces of news. The owner, Jamie, has provided links to partner sites offering ‘Top City Jobs’ and ‘Top Law Jobs’, and has provided a really targetted news feed to keep members up to date with the most relevant financial news. Jamie has also integrated his blog with the network, and carried the CreditCrunched branding across both.

The network owner has said of SocialGO that he liked “It’s ability to get set up within minutes. The staff are very friendly and supportive and I’m really looking forward to the new functionality that is continually being added.” He added “Overall, SocialGO has saved me potentially £000s in web design and database development, so thanks!”

CreditCrunched has not only used SocialGO to provide a professional resource for members to find new jobs, meet new contacts and lend advice to others affected by the credit crunch; it has provided a social place for members to share stories, vent about recent personal experiences and to lend support to other people in similar situations.

I am pleased to be able to report that we have just pushed another update to the SocialGO codebase. Amongst the hundreds of fixes and tweaks here are a few highlights.

Forums

• Forum owners can now rearrange the order of their top level forums by clicking and dragging them into a different order. Simple, but effective
• You can now subscribe to forum posts at the Forum level, not just topic level. This means you can keep up to date with new discussions as they are started.
  
• Moderators can now reassign posts between forums.
• You can now start a new post with existing content by using the “Quote to topic” option.

Advanced Member Search

You can now search by custom questions, age, gender, name, and even by location! This makes your network members able to find each other by any combination of information. The location search does a latitude and longitude lookup of the address you enter. It’s freeform too so you can enter city, country, postcode or any combination of these.

Tag Clouds

We are starting to improve our tagging functionality slowly but surely. First-off we have added tag clouds to the browse videos page and also the video views. This tag cloud below shows all tags on public videos available on your network and clicking on them performs a tag search.

Other bits….

• Custom question answers that are urls now get converted into links.
• The comment double-spacing issue has been fixed. You can now do paragraph spaces in your comments on blogs, photos etc.
• Forum topics now appear in the activity feed.
• You can now upload custom thumbnails for videos incase you are embedding from a third party source that we don’t yet support.

What’s next?

• We have got a new admin system coming allowing you even better control over your network and a totally awesome new look and feel.
• We have got a major upgrade to the API allowing people to have more control over their network’s content.
• and a few surprises too……

Got a question? Get in touch at http://owners.socialgo.com or http://www.socialgo.com/help

JanetLove is a great example of how to use SocialGO to expand an existing website.  JanetLove started life as a fansite for Janet Jackson, with hundreds of subscribers. However, the site owner wanted to give his subscribers more than just a website to read about Janet, he wanted them to be able to interact with each other.  So, he chose SocialGO as the ideal platform to take his fansite further by providing a place for his readers to create profiles, make friends with other fans, join common interest groups, create events, message each other and much more.

Now that Janet Jackson is on tour, the network has proved really useful for fans across the globe to discuss the concerts in the forum, write reviews for the magazine, and to share photos and videos of Janet and her performances! The network has also been great for fans to really easily interact with other people attending the same gigs using the ‘Events’ feature!

With so much more for his subscribers to do online, the network owner has found that they are staying online for much longer. This has opened up a great money making opportunity for him by running Google advertisements on his network that monetise the increased traffic!

Good luck to JanetLove!

We are pleased to announce that SocialGO is now in Open BETA. Anyone wanting to try the service can now register on SocialGO.com without the need for a registration code.

In addition, we are lauching a competition to find the most creative, innovative and active social network developed on SocialGO. To enter your network in to the competition, sign-up to http://owners.socialgo.com, and click ‘Yes’ next to ‘Enter Competition’ in the sign-up form.

Entries will be judged by a panel including blogger Neville Hobson and design agency Bostock and Pollitt, and the best one will win £1000 when the competition closes at the end of the BETA period.

Good luck!