Tinder and Forbes might seem like an unlikely pairing, but they’ve just collaborated on a social networking app (to be launched this October) – one with very, very exclusive membership criteria. In order to join, you have to have made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list; it’s being touted as “speed networking” for rising stars.
There’s a wide variety of reasons why people might want to start their own social network; privacy is a dominant one. Whatever you’re interested in keeping safe, from your children to data about how you use the internet, smaller social networks can be a very appealing option. Here’s three popular private social networks, to show you just how viable they can be in today’s market, and some of the ways you can utilise plugins like PeepSo. Read more
At a glance, it might look like Facebook is your only option if you want to effectively incorporate social networking into your business’ online marketing strategy; but that’s simply not true. Here’s some facts and figures you should know about social media in 2015, and which might help show you just how relevant and profitable a niche, privately hosted social network could be. Read more
If you run an international company, it’s worth remembering that Facebook is blocked and/or banned in some of the world’s biggest markets. While China technically lifted its ban on Facebook in 2013, it seems that access is still only available within the 17-square-mile free trade zone in Shanghai (to make foreign investors feel more at home). Access in Vietnam is hit-and-miss, and content is heavily censored thanks to an official decree passed in 2013 (so if you’re trying to get your post shared in the Vietnamese market, you might be out of luck). Pakistan will block any pages that seem to have blasphemous content; Bangladesh is the same. Even in countries where Facebook is available, it’s not always the social network of choice: VK is the most popular social network in Russia, and Japan’s social networking landscape is dominated by Mixi (which has 25 million Japanese users, where Facebook only has 16 million).
Facebook isn’t the only social network.
And that’s just taking into account location-based markets – Facebook isn’t always the most popular social networking site for particular employment, lifestyle or age demographics, either. Style bloggers dominate on Instagram; academics who don’t use Facebook can be found on Academia.edu.
If you have your own social network to connect with prospective clients or users in countries or demographics where Facebook isn’t going to reach them, you’re automatically ahead of the game; using Facebook is basic online marketing, using your own private social network to widen your reach beyond Facebook’s borders is smart marketing.
Facebook is, for the most part, not a particularly good representation of what people’s lives are really like; their profiles represent how they *want* to be perceived. A happy marriage, a busy social life, an image constructed through careful filtering of content.
But what happens when the image we want to portray to our personal connections doesn’t match up to what we want to send out to our professional ones? That profile picture of you and your partner at a festival covered in mud might make for a great anecdote and paint your life the way you want your friends to see it, but it’s not going to look so great to your customers or a prospective employer. You may be out and proud to your friends and family with your religion, sexuality, veganism etc, but don’t want your co-workers to judge you (or even worse, fire you) based on those attributes. If you work in the justice system, you probably don’t want people you’ve sent to jail knowing your daughter’s name or what suburb you live in.
Image via cambodia4kidsorg on Flickr.
People navigate these issues in a variety of ways; some will create two profiles, one for work and one for family and friends. Switching between accounts can be time consuming, and not everyone will get the message about which profile they should add. Some will carefully filter content and adjust their privacy settings to make sure that only certain people are seeing certain content; but this can be restrictive in terms of letting old friends find you, or letting people share content (eg, photos that they’re also in). Others decide it’s just too difficult, and the risks outweigh the benefits of belonging to a large social network.
Smaller, privately owned social networks are a great way forward if you want to keep the different parts of your life separate. Want to share things with just family, and not worry about anyone else finding your profile? Set up your own little corner of the web. Need a space where you can connect with your clients, and have complete control over what they see, and how they interact with you? A private social network keeps your work and personal lives completely separate. And further, when it’s your own social network, you understand what “private” really means. You know exactly who is on the network, and how they can find you; plus, PeepSo’s own privacy policy is crystal clear.
You’ve got mail…and new mentions…and new direct messages…
The way we communicate keeps evolving and changing. We’ve now got such a plethora of options at our fingertips that phrases like “I’m not a phone person” or “I don’t do text” have become necessary qualifiers when trying to express how we prefer to communicate.
All of these channels have their advantages, and disadvantages. Public business pages on Facebook allow you to reach a lot of people…including spambots and trolls. The phone forces you to think on your feet, which can induce serious anxiety – as much as it’s nice to hear someone’s voice, and have a conversation in real time. Email is quick, but messages can get lost in the pile if you’re someone who gets a lot of emails every day. Snail mail isn’t always more reliable. Twitter’s character restrictions can be well, restrictive. Skype lets you converse face to face with people all over the world, but you’ve got to have a strong internet connection (and a high data cap).
What I’d suggest this tells us is: we need to think about all of the options available to us, and make sure we’re using those channels as effectively as possible. Having your very own private social network, based on your own WordPress site, is an option that many people aren’t aware of, and one that can revolutionise your web presence; one that can give you a whole new way to communicate with customers (existing and potential). It’ll allow you to reach those who don’t want to join the “big boys” of social networking for privacy reasons, and those who get your posts filtered out of their newsfeed by default (thanks to Facebook’s algorithms).
In version 1.3.0, we focused on tweaking some of the features. These tweaks are important for future versions.
We’ve started the process of preparing PeepSo for one-click updates. Instead of uninstalling then re-installing all the plugins, for future versions you’ll be able to just click the update link next to each plugin. Very simple.
This function will start working in the next version of PeepSo. This should be the last time you update manually. Please remember that this is still work in progress. It will look somewhat like this:
One click updates and upgrades for PeepSo and its plugins.
Now that PeepSo has been out for a while, we have had reports of a few URLs and third party plugins not working well with PeepSo.
To improve the compatibility and stability of the plugins, we wrote the router. That should avoid issues with popular plugins like WPML which change the URL of the page by making additions like:
‘?lang=french’
This improvement is strictly under the hood. The only change you’ll see is the construction of the URLs. That’s usually just the addition of a question mark.
This is how the profile link appears in PeepSo 1.2.1:
http://sampledomain.com/profile/eric
And this is how the link appears in PeepSo 1.3.0:
http://sampledomain.com/profile/?eric
We also changed the behavior, look and feel of the action buttons on user profiles. Adding friends is now a three-state button with no modal confirmations needed. It’s all ajaxified too.
3-state friends buttons on user listings
Those action buttons have also been added to all user listings. You can see them on members pages, user profiles, and your friend list. The design is consistent to give users a feeling of confidence and to avoid confusion.
We made a few minor changes to the profile pages:
Profile view after styling tweaks.
We’ve made sure that PeepSo styling is consistent. That’s why we went with square and sharp edges over rounded corners and round avatars. If you feel like all square is not your thing, feel free to check out our documentation on how to override PeepSo CSS.
In addition to those design and functionality tweaks, we also fixed a number of bugs. You can see the full changelog here.
The chat plugin is almost ready. It just needs a few design tweaks and some testing. It will be released next. Watch out for it!
To update to Version 1.3.0 you’ll have to un-install and re-install all the plugins. Last time! Here’s the documentation on how to do it.
The free core version is fantastic on its own. If you want to unlock the true potential of social networking for WordPress, get the other plugins today. You can buy them by clicking the link below.
Buy Today! |
If you’d like to see what’s coming up next, check out our roadmap here.
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We’re proud to announce the release of PeepSo 1.2.0. This release focuses on Core PeepSo and MsgSo. We added a bunch of new features and improved others.
PeepSo 1.1.0 introduced a Members Page that listed community members and included a search field. This version adds sorting and filters.
You can sort users by:
You can also select members by gender and only view users who have uploaded avatars. Combining filters means you could search for “female users with avatars who were recently online.” Cool, right? You could even filter further by adding a name and looking for “female users with avatars who were recently online and called ‘Jane.’”
We used Ajax to power the search which means there are no reloads and everything is superfast. Want to see how fast? Check this out.
Members page user filtering
Twitter link fetched on PeepSo Stream
Paste a video link or Instagram link into a Web page and you immediately get a preview of the destination. It’s very cool… so we now do the same thing in Peepso. Paste a link and those oEmbeds (that’s what they’re called) will give your audience a preview. This is how it looks.
Cool, right?
Ajax worked so well in Search that we decided to use it to improve Messages as well. Now there’s no need to reload a page when sending a message and when someone contacts you, you’ll receive both a notification and the message itself. It works exactly like a chat.
You can even see when someone is in the process of typing to you, so no more crossed messages or wondering whether you’re being ignored.
Messages indicate when someone’s typing.
We’ve added many more small improvements and fixes. You can read about all the major features of this release here. The full changelog will tell you everything we did. To see what we are planning next, check out our Roadmap here.
Don’t wait. Upgrade to the latest version today. You can find upgrade instructions here.
PeepSo to Buddy Press Migration Tool
One of the most frequently asked questions we’ve received since releasing PeepSo is whether we have an easy way to migrate BuddyPress to PeepSo.
Why, yes. Yes, we do!
PeepSo Migrate is a migrator plugin that will move your data from BuddyPress to PeepSo. It’s super-easy to use.
Just install the plugin, click the button, and watch the magic happen.
Note that the Migrator only moves the data within the same WordPress installation. So you can’t use it to migrate BuddyPress from http://sampledomain1.com to http://sampledomain2.com. But you weren’t
planning to do that anyway, were you?
If you’ve wanted to give PeepSo a try but were afraid you’d lose your BuddyPress content, you’ve got nothing to worry about. We’ve got you covered.
Here’s a video that shows how the migrator works:
Data for features that PeepSo does not currently support, such as groups, cannot be migrated. Once we add those features, we will add them to the migrator as well. For the Migrator to move data such as User Friends and Messages, the FriendSo and MsgSo plugins must be installed with PeepSo.
That depends on how much content you have on BuddyPress. We tested it with a community of over 2,500 users and more than 15,000 activities. It took us about four minutes. A larger community with about 1000 users and 60,000 activities can be migrated in about 11 minutes. That should be just enough time to make your cat purr. If you don’t have a cat, it’s enough time to make a cup of coffee.
The Migrator will delete all your existing PeepSo content, so don’t use it if you have anything you’ll miss.
The BuddyPress Migrator is totally free and available from the backend of WordPress. Go to Plugins > Add new and search for ‘PeepSo’.
BuddyPress To PeepSo Migration Tool listing in WP plugins directory.
Give it a try today and create an amazing community with PeepSo!
See the listing of the plugin on the official directory of WordPress plugins, just click here.
PeepSo Members Page
We’re proud to announce that PeepSo 1.1.0 has just been released!
A major focus of this update was the inclusion of a Members page to create a special wall for your community. Combined with real-time search, you’ll be able to filter users as you type and see how many friends you have in common for each person listed.
PeepSo Getting Started Page
We’ve also created a ‘Getting Started’ page with a video showing the first steps you should take as you create your own community. You’ll receive a list showing the pages, the shortcodes and the official PeepSo plugins available. Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll give you a free copy of The Secrets of Successful Online Communities ebook.
Photo counter on Activity Stream in PicSo 1.1.0
Another feature that was introduced in PicSo 1.1.0 is the overlay that says how many pictures there are in one post. It looks fantastic and really adds to the plugin’s usability.
This version also fixes a number of bugs and adds improvements not only to the core but also to supporting plugins. You can see the changelog here.
Don’t wait. Upgrade to the latest version today. You can find upgrade instructions here.
