First Q&A Workshop A HUGE Success!

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

I think it is safe to say that our first SocialGO Workshop was a great success! We will certainly be running another one again very soon and we will be posting up some follow-up answers and material on the Owners' blog tomorrow as well as a summary of the topics covered.

Once again, thanks for everyone who turned up and next time we will work out how to make a bit more structured. :) Thanks to canada.rob for these kind words!

Right....I need some sleep after that!

November Goodies

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

We have set a fairly ambitious release roadmap for November and December and here is a sneak peak of 6 of the great new features and updates coming to SocialGO.

1. Chat Room

A fantastic multi-user chat room where you can talk with everyone in your network and even spin-off to your own private chats!

2. API Docs

We are launching a set of documentation for the SocialGO API allowing you to make API calls to your network from any third party application. You can import members, build your own off-site widgets and even sync data with external data sources.

3. Facebook Connect

Much like our Twitter Connect widget, the Facebook Connect widget will allow your members to login directly to your network using their Facebook details.

4. Contact Importer v2

We are working hard on a new contact importer which will allow you to not only Import Webmail Contacts but will also allow you to Invite Social Networking Contacts too! Time for your networks to go viral.... :)

5. Internationalisation

We are working through your networks to complete internationalisation of all the corners of code including emails, error messages, forms and feedback. This is not only good news for our hundreds of non-English networks but also for those of you who with to personalise messages for your network.

5. More AJAX

We are reworking the way that requests and messaging work to make them more responsive. This was a heavily requested feature.

6. New In-Browser Chat
As well as our shiny new chat room, we are hoping to launch a shiny new in-browser chat experience for text-chat among your users. Get ready for your visitor times to explode. More details in the coming weeks.

More things being announced and launched soon! Don't forget to pop along to our workshop later in the week for more information or to ask any questions you my have.

October 26th Release

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Today we pushed a new maintenance release of your SocialGO Network code which includes a number of fixes to your networks including :

- On approval of video and photo items, an activity feed item will now appear.

- Sub-content of tabs is now controlled by member levels. If you were to limit the access to the videos tab, all sub-videos will also be limited.

- Future dated blog posts now appear in the magazine only when their post date is reached.

- The event invite friends function now works correctly for all events.

- Group locations now display correctly for group members.

- New members joining the network get a homepage activity feed entry.

- Editing a comment on the videos page now works in Internet Explorer. There was an issue with the video appearing over the edit box.

- Approving members within the Member Manager or Resetting their password now sends them an email confirming the change.

This Week's Release

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Hey All,

We will be deploying this week's new code on Monday which includes over 80 different resolved issues. We will publish information on this on Monday.

Cheers and have a great weekend!

Today's Outage

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Hello all,

Today a portion of SocialGO networks where offline due to a hardware failure on one of our core systems. We are investigating the root cause of the issue and are taking steps to ensure it does not happen again.

The development team is making good progress getting the chat, FaceBook and various other widgets ready for launch in the next few releases.

Thanks for your patience this evening.

Chat, Facebook Connect, Zemanta, API Docs

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Good Day Network Owners,

As you may or may not know, SocialGO HQ pushes a release to the platform once a week, (usually on a Wednesday) which contains between 20-30 different changes that have been made and have gone through testing. Many of these are minor tweaks and changes and some are the introduction of entirely new features like Member Billing 2.0 or the Profile Designer.

With this in mind then, here are a few things coming out today.

Coming Today we are introducing email verification on signup to make sure that your new members verify their email addresses on signup. This will improve the delivery rate of your mass-messages and will also ensure that those members receive emails on new requests and messages sent to them. We are also rolling out updated mail servers to further white-label the platform. Looking at mail headers will now no longer say alerts@socialgo.com but will instead come from network-notify.com.

We are also releasing a fix to CSV data export so you can easily get a copy of your members and manipulate it in programs such as Excel.

In the next 2-4 weeks ....
Facebook Connect
We are in the final stages of testing the Facebook Connect widget which will allow people signup to your network with FB details as well as incorporate a Share function allowing people to share content on their networks with their Facebook Feed.

New Contact Importer
We are working on a new Contact Importer which will allow people to invite contacts using all webmail programs but also many popular social services as well. We will also be introducing the option to automatically redirect people to invite their contacts on signup to increase virality of your network if you so wish.

Chat Room Widget
We have a multi-user chat room widget in production which we are working on and plan to have this ready within the next 2-3 weeks.

Zemanta Widget
If you have the Zemanta toolbar in your Firefox browser you will know how great it is for suggesting content to place into your blogs. You will soon be able to load this directly into your network using the Zemanta Widget for SocialGO coming soon.

Improved API Documentation
We will shortly be launching a WIKI which contains examples and use cases for building with the SocialGO API. If you have basic programming skills you will find everything you need to get, update and create a range of different items on your social network. It will also contain information on developing your own widgets and themes for SocialGO networks.

The above list is just some of the things we are planning to launch in the next 4 weeks. As details become clear beyond that, I will be updating the SocialGO Owners' blog so please do keep an eye on it or even subscribe using the link at the top right of the http://owners.socialgo.com/

We have several widget developers and theme developers that want to hear from you. Why not start an Idea? on GetSatisfaction.com/socialgo to see what other network owners' think of your concept.

New Owners' Theme

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Hi guys!

We have just updated the SocialGO Owners' theme which is a preview of a new collection of themes coming from Ryan at GO Social in the next few months.

We are hoping to launch these in the next 10 days in your Theme Stores.

Updates to your Networks Today

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Hi guys,

We have pushed an update today to SocialGO networks and as always ask you guys to check your networks and let us know if you spot anything.

You will notice that you now get Notifications from activity within your groups so you can stay up date with activity in the corners of your network. We want feedback on this change and will make optimizations in the coming weeks.

We are readying Profile Designer, Twitter login, GoCart and Member Billing V2 as well so stand by for those coming very soon.

Looking forward to your feedback!

SocialGO's Next Release

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

We are readying a major release of SocialGO due out very soon. This features a number of major under-the-hood improvements and 3 great new widgets.

Notifications will be updated to give you alerts when there is activity on your profile, in your groups and in your events. This includes those groups and events which you have joined rather than just those which you have created. No more activity in groups which you don't find out about for weeks!

Some areas of SocialGO have not always been the snappiest and we are addressing this with faster widgets, photo, video and profile browsing and also messaging.

We are releasing three widgets at the same time, including the previously announced GOCart, a Profile Designer allowing your members to design their pages and also a Twitter Connect widget allowing your members to login to your network using their twitter credentials.

Other developers are busy readying new themes and a bunch of other undisclosed widgets which will be announced only when they are in our hands....

Finally the second part of the Member Billing overhaul will be complete allowing you to match up Member Levels (announced last week) and Billing Plans so you can charge for access to the best parts of your network. This will support free trials and multiple billing providers.

We are very excited about the next couple of months here at SocialGO and can't wait to share these great new toys with you and your members.

Thanks for all your support :)

GOCart - Coming Soon

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

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.

Click here to reserve your free copy!

New Features Today!

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

The team has been super busy working on backend upgrades and modifications including implementing Zuora to manage the business side of the SocialGO platform. Now that this is complete, the development team can swing onto making great features for your networks. This week is the first of many new-feature releases which we will be bringing you over the next 2 months.

FEATURED GROUPS

So perhaps you have 200 groups on your network but you want to give some of them the spotlight? Well now you can with Featured Groups. Simply head over to a groups profile (as an administrator) and hit the new Feature Group button.

Then simply go and drag the featured groups widget to the top of the groups list and your done!

VIDEOS IN GROUPS

A long-time requested feature is the ability to add videos to your groups. Again, you will need to drag the widget into your Group Profiles, but once that is done, your member will be able to upload videos galore to your group profiles. Simple!

MEMBER LEVELS + NEW MEMBER MANAGER

The Member Manager has been updated to allow sorting by column headings, better searching and easier navigation. In addition you will also find a new sub-tab called Member Levels.

In here you will be able to define sub-sets of members who have access to specific tabs, specific content and certain features.

When you edit a Tab's settings you will now be able to choose which member Levels can access it. If you leave them all unticked, anyone will have access.

We will soon be hooking this into our MEMBER BILLING system so that you can charge people to access premium areas of your site. This will be a fantastic way of generating serious revenue from your network by upselling your members from a free account to a paid account. We will also be introducing support for ClickAndBuy.com and revamping our PayPal support to give all network owners the opportunity to build profitable networks on SocialGO.

And finally.....

SocialGO is also working on some in-house widgets including an integration pack for BuyItSellIt.com, probably one of the best shopping carts around and a range of other heavily requested features which we will be getting out the door in the coming weeks.

The Lab is also producing new and exciting widgets and we have 30+ new and improved themes coming to the Theme store.

I am excited and i hope you are too! As always we are here to help at support@socialgo.com. We will be doing a Workshop today on these new features if you want to come and take a look or if you have any questions.

Cheers!

What's Coming Soon to SocialGO

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

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

SocialGO Networks Get A Facelift

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

This weeks release has gone live. With it a number of fixes below but most importantly, we have pushed an update to Network Styles. There are a range of accross the board changes like photos in the activity feed but there is also the option to have Theme Rounding which can be seen in the above example and on your networks too!

These are now live on your networks and work in Firefox and Safari web browsers. Internet Explorer does not support rounded corners using CSS without doing a lot of heavy custom code.

Don't like the new rounded look? Then you can disable it!
Just head over to your Admin Center and you can turn it off.

Other changes include :

- Changed browse members from order by Most Friends to order by Last Active.
- Delete activity has been fixed up
- Delete Inbox messages now are removed without the delay

Cheers!

We want to feature your network!

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Hello All,

Do you run a popular SocialGO network? If YES then we want to know! We are looking for some more featured networks to put on SocialGO.com to promote some of the amazing things that people are doing with our platform.

Drop me a line on alex@socialgo.com and we will get you loads of great traffic.

Cheers!

This week's release

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Hello Owners!

It has been a while since we have posted an update on what is happening here at SocialGO HQ so here it is :

This week's release contains a number of small fixes for issues including :

Months in the Archives in the magazine stopping after 6
A Read More link appearing if you use the Split feature when writing a blog.

The dev team have been working a number of behind-the-scenes scaling and infrastructure projects which has meant we haven't had as much time as we would have liked to pump out nice new front-end features. But thankfully we are now coming to the end of this and it's time for the new features to start rolling out again.
Next week's release is already a hum-dinger with loads of great things that will add visible value to your network. It's going to be a great few weeks ahead!

The guys at WidgetLaboratory are pumping out new widgets, with 3 in the last week alone including a Wordpress integration widget, a Miro feed plugin widget for publishing your videos and LabTabs, the ability to add custom drop-down tabs to your network.

The Theme Store is also up and running for SocialGO networks. You can go and preview the themes at http://my.socialgo.com/ before you buy one for your network.

A great few weeks are ahead! Can't wait to show you what we have in store for you.

SocialGO Affiliate Program

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

We are currently looking for people to try out the SocialGO affiliate program with a view to general release in the next 2-3 weeks.

If you are interested in referring some friends to SocialGO and getting paid for it, then head over to http://affiliate.socialgo.com/ and register. We will then approve you within 12 hours and you can get your unique referal link. Payouts are made by PayPal.

Simple! We will be adding some referal links and artwork shortly too.

Weekly Update and Missing Page Content Solution

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

We are working on some fantastic new toys for network owners to be launched very soon and are so excited about what it means for you and your members.

This week's release paved the way for what's coming. A small piece of new functionality that you guys can have fun with is the ability to move the sidebar on your network from Left to Right and also the ability to disable SocialGO stylesheets.

You will find these new options in your admin system :

This is a great tool for you guys to get in there and create some fantastic new themes from scratch. Let us know what you create and how you get on with it!

We also have a bit of an apology to make. When the layout manager was first released, we where supposed to depreciate the old Page Content block in the Tabs and Pages section of your admin center. Custom content should not be placed in here if you have the Layout Manager enabled and when we fixed the problem this week, network owners that where using the Layout Manager with the Page content section where seeing their content removed.

To solve this problem follow these steps :

Visit the Layout Manager at http://my.socialgo.com/
Click on the page where the content is missing and then click on Edit Page (second one in). You will then see your old code in the Page Content field. Copy this to your clip board :
Then drag a fresh Custom HTML widget from the sidebar and double click on it.
Paste the code from your clipboard and press save. Your content will now appear on your network again.

Problem solved, I am sorry for the confusion this has caused.

If anyone has trouble or confusion about adding content to their page watch this breif video and read the description on its process.

Have a great weekend everyone! Lot's of great things to come shortly.

Today's Release

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Today's release includes a new tool for admin's only. The "Admin Toolbar" shows when you are logged into a network that you own, your users do not see it...ever!.

At the moment it only includes links to your admin center but we are looking to use it as a way to give people more control over their networks.

We will shortly be adding an option to hide it and additional functionality as well to keep you better informed.

The easter bunny has come early - today's release also includes a much anticipated feature which you will find in the admin system. Full blog post on this coming Tuesday.... Please report any issues you find with it to support@socialgo.com. The WidgetLaboratory guys will be around this weekend as well to help you as well at www.widgetlaboratory.com

More details coming soon.......

Charles Delamain

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

Last night, Charles Delamain, the SocialGO/Bright Things COO was killed in a traffic accident. He was a valued member of the team, a dear friend and a devoted family man and his contribution will be sorely missed.

The entire SocialGO team send our deep condolences to his family and friends.

Dominic Wheatley, CEO commented: ‘Charles was a dear friend whom I had known since we were at school. He loved life and lived it to the full. Charles was courageous, loyal and gifted. He excelled at so many things – as a soldier, husband, father, businessman and friend to so many. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him and our thoughts and prayers go to his family. ‘

Rest in peace.

Coming Late March : The Layout Manager

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100

So this is our proto-type layout manager that we've been going on about. Doesn't look like much? But it means a lot for you and your network.

What you are looking at here, is the homepage view, you can see the Latest Activity block on the left of the page and the homepage widgets on the right. On this page you can :

Drag and drop any of the widgets on the page to any of the drop zones (A,B,C,D etc)
Disable any widgets on the page
Add multiple custom tabs to the top of the page
Add multiple sub-tabs to the pages
'Pin' features and widgets so they display on all pages
Add items to the sidebar on all or specific pages

You can add custom code blocks and custom RSS feeds anywhere on your networks as well. Allowing you to more deeply integrate special messages or advert code into your networks.

And then we have the widget store which will allow network owners to get cool new features for your networks. We will be opening with a selection of widgets from WidgetLaboratory.com which will rapidly grow to include more from them, us and other developers too.

We are really excited about this and can't wait to get you guys up and running with it.