A very happy new year to the whole SocialGO family! We have kicked 2010 off to a fantastic start and the whole team are very excited about the year ahead.

First of all, we are delighted to announce that Vikrant Bhargava has joined our board of directors. Vikrant is one of the world’s most successful internet entrepreneurs and will be playing an important role helping to define our strategy going forward. We are really excited about working with him to grow SocialGO in the months to come. As Monday’s press release put it:

Bhargava, who brings a wealth of expertise in internet-related industries to SocialGO, co-founded PartyGaming plc and is largely credited with taking that company from start-up in 2001 to nearly $1B in revenue by 2006.

Secondly, myself and Steve Hardman who founded SocialGO with Dominic Wheatley in 2007 will be joining the board as joint Managing Directors.

The SocialGO team is also growing with the addition of two new developers. Mark Hamlin and Chris Beck have joined us as work continues on Version 2 of SocialGO. Version 2 will be a completely new code-base to power our networks bringing a combination of new features, improved speed and greater customization. It is still in its early stages of development but we are really excited about what it will mean for niche social networking. We are laying the foundations to make SocialGO the platform of choice for building social networks online. It will represent a big leap forward for SocialGO when it launches this year.

We have new features coming to SocialGO networks in the next few months including a new chat system, a classifieds system and more. More information will be posted on the SocialGO Owners Blog and via @socialgo.