SocialGO Owners Network

Okay, so the Easter present we slipped into your admin centre when you weren't watching was the Layout Manager and wow have we had some feedback from everyone playing with their new toy in the last 24 hours.  Thanks for all the compliments, suggestions and odd bug report.  Keep it coming!

There are a few known bugs that we are working on and they will be fixed soon. If their is anything you discover thats needs to be looked at, tell us right away on support@socialgo.com.

Now with great freedom comes great responsibility.  You can now do some super crazy things with your networks , but you can also get yourself into a pickle if you're not careful.  If you do, don't worry as help is not far away. Spence (a.k.a. the Evil Genius) over at Widget Laboratory is particularly expert at getting owners out of these pickles (the Lab worked very closely with us througout the Layout Manager development and knows it back to front).  So drop Spence a message if you need de-pickling on help@widgetlaboratory.com.  

We have also created a new topic in the forum for the Layout Manager, which should build into a great repository of ideas and advice.  Also, there is a Layout Manager section in this blog where you can watch videos and read tutorials.

Enjoy
Stivi

Due to the recent launch of the Layout Manager and, subsequently, the many queries that have resulted from this, we have changed tomorrow's (Wednesday, April 15) workshop theme to 'Introduction to The Layout Manager'. The time of the workshop has been changed to 4:30 p.m. GMT (11:30 a.m. EST, 8:30 a.m. PDT). Join Will & Alex for a comprehensive introductory workshop which will cover everything you may need to know about the Layout Manager, from launching it to maximizing its creative benefits for your network. The previously scheduled workshops will remain but with their dates pushed back to the following weeks.

Don't forget to visit this link to sign up for information on future workshops, and please email workshops@socialgo.com should you be interested in attending this one.

We hope to see you there!

Here is a quick update on new features coming soon to your networks. 

New Member Types and Advanced Permissions

We will soon be adding the ability to define additional member types in your SocialGO networks. These will be setupfrom your Member Manager and will give you the option of assigning special permissions and rule sets to sub-sets of your user base. This is the first part of our new member billing system which is in progress and, when complete, will give you powerful tools to upsell your users to paying plans to increase your revenues.

New Billing Provider

We are working on integrating with an additional provider for those of you who do not want to use PayPal. This will be released as part of our upgrade to the member billing system.

New Widgets

The Lab has been busy working away and are moments away from launching LabAds and LabConnect. LabAds allows you to run your own advertising on your network and LabConnect allows you to have a common login across all of yourSocialGO networks. Other widgets launching soon include an eCommerce integration package, profile designer and a number of others well TBA as soon as we can.

New Themes

We have 20+ very new and very different themes launching in the next few weeks which will, again, completely transform the look and feel of a SocialGO network.

General Improvements

There are loads of general improvements going live in the coming weeks as well including video in Groups, some cool new promotion tools for your network and also some major optimizations to improve speeds and performance at peak times. 
 
More news soon!
Alex 



We are currently working on GOCart, a new shopping cart integration with BuyItSellIt.com. If you are interested in trying it out and setting up a full eCommerce shop on your network, send us a message via Twitter.

Our data centre move is largely complete now, so we hope you and your members will start to experience much better page speeds as a result. 

The move was a mamouth project that took over two months.  It went well................... except for the final 10 days.  As a result we appreciate that some networks over the past 10 days have experienced occassional issues such as error pages and some functionality mis-behaving.  We are truly sorry for this and have worked 24/7 to rectify these issues. 

While its of little comfort when you and your members are experience these problems, we can assure you that everything will be back to normal soon, if its not already.   We hope the dramatically improved page speeds you will now experience will be worth these short term bumps.

Once again very sorry for the the recent issues. 

The SocialGO Team

Want to translate your entire network in seconds? Use Google's translate tool to convert your network's language instantly! The translation isn't 100% accurate, but is a great way to reada huge amount of your network (or just a network you're a member of) in your own language.

1) Grab the code HERE

2) Then paste it in to a homepage widget (learn how HERE)

3)After adding the widget, you'll see it on your 'Latest Activity' page...

It is worth noting that if the Network Creator has sign-in required on the network, the Google program will "fail" and revert to the front page...

Hi all,

We are in the process of upgrading our DNS Server to enable faster access for US residents; as a result there may be temorary outage which may causing images and colours to not quite work correctly.

Bare with it as we expect your access to be much faster afterwards :)

Yesterday you may have had some network speed problems for a few hours.  This was the result of some server optimsation work we are doing.  We now have the speeds back up and apologise for the temporary inconvenience.  So that we can continue to improve speed and handle the huge increase in traffic we will continue doing optimisation work over the coming week while we wait for all of our shiny new servers to arrive.  Thanks

The SocialGO team has been working hard to get the system ready to come out of BETA. Yesterday we pushed a release which fixed up the following issues :

1. Online members now displays properly. People will be taken offline if they are inactive for 3 minutes.
2. Upgrade to the chat system which was denying connections in some browsers
3. The first in a 2 part fix for Windows Vista customers who where having problems uploading to our servers. More on this later....
4. Owners can now edit and remove blogs
5. Birthdays are now displaying correctly on peoples profiles
6. 18+ Networks splash pages now allow them access directly to sub-pages without taking them back to the homepage
7. Magazine articles now appear straight away in the Magazine  
8. The Birthday widget has been fixed
9. Removed photos will now be ignored from the custom avatar folder
10. Setting your profile photo for groups and events has been made more reliable 
11. A bug with inviting friends to join an event or group has been fixed
12. A bug with inviting friends to join a network has been fixed
13. Several other issues as mentioned elsewhere...

So that is a few things ticked off the list. We have also made some big under the bonnet changes to the platform to improve speed at peek times and are preparing for a doubling of our infrastructure over the next few weeks.

So smoke is already pouring our of the team's keyboards here in Shoreditch, working on the next release which is coming out end of next week which will see a number of issues resolved including -

1. Reinstating the Message All Members feature from the admin system 
2. A replacement video system which will offer higher quality and faster streaming for all users. Vista users will see much faster uploads too for both Videos and Photos as a result 
3. Search will be made available to all networks again 
4. The network owner will be able to approve members from the members section. (Currently it can be done from the admin system only)
5. & quite a few more as well! TBA

 

Releases are being pushed weekly now and we will be communicating with people about which issues they can expect from each release at a minimum. 

You can expect to see a rapid improvement of your service over the next few weeks as we push updates and scale infrastructure. Thanks for all of your feedback, comments and support during this phase. We understand that many network owners have had a difficult time in the past few weeks and rest assured that we are committed to making SocialGO the perfect home for your online community. 

Alex 

Hello SocialGOers!

A very good Thursday evening to your all from SocialGO HQ. I am pleased to report that today's release has gone up and has fixed/improved the following areas : 

• Video, video, video!
  We have rolled out a our new, faster, video encoding system which will see your videos being delivered better than ever before. No more long waits, no more encoding failures, no more upload problems. Vista users will now be able to upload without a problem too. Give it a whirl! :)
• Search is now back in action including geographic searching under advanced search. 
• Simple uploader has been extended to music for Vista users still experiencing the IO Error  
• Language issues have been resolved.
• Event attendees listing now displays accurate member listing information.
• Message all members is back in action.
• Vista contact importer issue is resolved.
• You can now put your network into offline mode and access with your key.  
• The API has been migrated with the improvements up and running.
• Forgot password is now displaying correct help throughout.
• Members can now be approved from within the network.
• Scrolling through photos now works better. 
• Owners' now can delete multiple photos.  
• The redirect loop issue for custom content pages has been resolved. 
• Lot's and lots of other improvements as well!

So the update train is rolling and we will be pushing another big update this time next week. We also have our pricing announcement coming and another major upgrade to our infrastructure coming online. 

The next few weeks are going to the most exciting on SocialGO yet. We have got some great and surprising things planned to help you build fantastic, profitable networks on this platform in 2009. Thanks for all of your support during BETA and stay glued to this blog for more updates. 

Thanks guys!
Alex :)