Hello!
Ahead WebSoft Technologies is thrilled to announce our acquisition of SocialEngine! Many of you know us as SocialNetworking.Solutions, third party developers for SocialEngine for several years. We have also been working with SocialEngine to improve the script, fix bugs and bring new features over the past two years.
We want to first assure everyone that the SocialEngine commitment to outstanding software, company transparency, great customer service and support, and a strong developer community are our priorities.
Our staff will include someone who is known to many SocialEngine clients and experts. Donna is staying on as Chief Evangelist! She will continue to be involved in the community, support and with the SocialEngine PHP software development team.
We have many plans for the future of SocialEngine PHP. Speed enhancements, code updates and template improvements are all in our immediate plans. Further on down the line, we will update plugin features, bring new features and further strengthen our core. Our goal is to produce software that is optimized, streamlined, visually stunning, mobile friendly and feature packed.
As we progress, we anticipate providing more third party developer tutorials and coding standards. We feel this will be in the best interest of clients and developers and will ensure the success of everyone.
We would like to thank Jason, James, Kyle and Donna for their dedication to the SocialEngine platform and community. Owning SocialEngine is something we never thought possible and we are humbled by the trust that they have put in us. This is a dream come true! We are excited to have this opportunity to bring our vision to the SocialEngine platform!
With Appreciation,
The SocialEngine Team
This is great news for everyone in the community!
I am sure this merger will give new strength to the projects.
Moreover, it was a deliberate and balanced decision based on two years of joint work.
I know that there were many offers and requests. But the founders chose the best.
Wow, that's fantastic news, and what a great way to start 2022!
Especially for me, since I have been working with them since they started with SE, I know them well, and they have my trust; I also have a lot of their plugins installed on my site.
So, congratulations to you, from the bottom of my heart, for this outstanding achievement; you guys deserve it.
I know they will take SE to the next level, with all their great ideas, designs, passion, and excellent plugins that they develop.
You deserve this, and thank you for all your great support and work ethic!
I am a testament to your work and dedication to making this great platform run smoothly.
Kuddos and may 2022 brings us more excellent news!
I woke up this morning with a message on WhatsApp from SNS. Okay, wow.......but my first thought was about Donna! Whew! Glad to know you will be here Donna! That's all that matters!! Well, on a serious note, Ahead WebSoft Technologies is pretty amazing and I'm glad they have the SE "conn" now. Congrats!! ~T.
Hello.
Congratulations to SES for the acquisition of SE.
Anything that can advance our social networks is good.
However, we have worked with SEA for years and are very loyal to our suppliers.
SEA has provided exceptional work with our teams.
We hope to be sure that SES will not hinder the development of SEA in order to sell more of its modules.
It's just a legitimate concern and we hope SES will provide some information on it.
It's a very good thing that Donna is staying on the team.
Without it everything would be more complicated ...
With our congratulations.
Thank you both for your kind words about me.
As for third party devs such as SocialApps.Tech and all of the others, there will be no changes. That was something that was discussed before the acquisition. SNS is aware of how important a strong developer community is and is committed to keeping it strong and making it stronger. We had thought that we explained that in the second paragraph in the first post above, but perhaps it wasn't clear enough. Sorry about that.
Indeed, we read it correctly. However, we end up with a dominant position for SES.
It is legitimate to ask questions about the future.
On the other hand, everyone knows that the CORE of SES is not compatible with that of SEA. (Photo Lightbox etc ...)
We are very skeptical because SES could naturally promote its products. It is quite logical to think so.
Either way, we will stay the course with our current suppliers until compatibility is complete.
The financial stakes are too high and there is no question of migrating our content.
We have spent thousands of dollars and there is no question of changing the structure of our sites.
Thank you Donna and forgive our concerns, but I think they are normal.
Lovea said:
Indeed, we read it correctly. However, we end up with a dominant position for SES.
It is legitimate to ask questions about the future.
On the other hand, everyone knows that the CORE of SES is not compatible with that of SEA. (Photo Lightbox etc ...)
We are very skeptical because SES could naturally promote its products. It is quite logical to think so.
Either way, we will stay the course with our current suppliers until compatibility is complete.
The financial stakes are too high and there is no question of migrating our content.
We have spent thousands of dollars and there is no question of changing the structure of our sites.
Thank you Donna and forgive our concerns, but I think they are normal.
It's not a problem to voice your concerns and it is normal to do. I've been in this position before. Back in phpFox when YouNet bought it. They kept it secret though as they thought people would be upset. Then, they had to actually announce that yes, they owned it. They still have a developer community.
For here, SNS knows how important the third party experts are to SocialEngine clients and how detrimental it would be to remove any or cause issues for any. I hope that helps to ease your concerns.
The only way to succeed is to have the SocialEngine core be the core. I trust that they will do as YouNet did, keep SNS as a separate division of Ahead WebSoft. This is what I was told is the plan. I will get with the team Monday and see if they have time to come on and post.
Thank you for your kindness Donna ...
We love you and thank you very much for your reassuring message.
I must admit that our team was a little worried tonight.
We love SEA because they have always been there to help us and move our projects forward.
We owe them a great deal.
If they were impacted by this acquisition, we would be very disappointed because it is a competent company.
Tomorrow is another day ...
Love
On behalf of Ahead WebSoft Technologies and SNS team, firstly I would like to convey my thanks to all of you.
We have always worked hard and dedicatedly to improve SE and help our clients grow their community with new releases and fixes.
As mentioned by Donna here and in the blog post, our goal is to produce software that is optimized, streamlined, visually stunning, mobile friendly and feature packed.
As we progress, we anticipate providing more third party developer tutorials and coding standards. We feel this will be in the best interest of clients and developers and will ensure the success of everyone.
There will be no change in the working of 3rd party developers. As right now, SocialEngine core will be the core and all 3rd parties will have to keep their plugins compatible with upcoming versions of SocialEngine in order to provide seamless working of the same.
At SE, we are committed to provide new features, improved code and fixes.
PeppaPigKilla said:
Guess I’m the only one not wholly excited about this. I hope to be convinced otherwise in the future though.
I can say I have them working with me on my social close to be 1 year, and they have helped me anytime also if was not their duty or I as too stupid to not notice by myself some simply errors I made.
They are a good choice since they are working on social engine and on add-ons and graphic since many years, and they will for sure improve SE and help third parts creators to do better and offer more solutions for us, the customers!
Congratulations to the team. As you started as expert, and now acquisition SocialEngine it's something that we are all proud of you!
I am sure that we gonna see a stronger community, better and transparent process of new updates!
Well this is interesting news. Sorry I've been rather late to the party. But all's fair in passion and growth.
Everyone seems to be worried about Social Networking Solutions's commitment to keeping products they sell as third party modules separate from the core. I say build it all in one package and grow the company. Merge development of everything that one company sells into a better product. That way, other developers can fill in the gaps others leave behind.
The reason I say do this now, is because as a base product, this allows features to be turned on or off without much of a hassle. And, you have them always with you. Rather than dividing your attention between a few main product lines. Kind of like how Samsung merged the Galaxy and Note lines together to focus their spare time on Foldables. It makes more sense to streamline development in this way.
It's hard these days to capture the market share of website owners. You can attract some people, but sometimes, it is fair to say, too little, too late. Look at what WoWonder promises out of the box for example. Or for that matter, ph7CMS. You'll always ahve your die hard supporters, but will still be left with an antiquated code base which may have withstood the test of time as an offering and achieve little else.
I say, if you truly wish to bring transparency and something new at the forefront of what people want in a website, make its presence compelling enough to contrast the likes of virtual isolation. What we need is more service integrations, and API support. We need AI compatibility with larger engines such as Google Cloud platform. We also need to outsource some features to services with existing clients, such as something that maybe Zapier integration or bots from telegram and Discord can achieve.
I put my website on hiatus because too many other apps keep people away from website discussions. This acquisition excites me, but there's still way too many issues with everything from spam bot crawlers to duplicate pages hidden deep inside the core of Social Engine to consider it changed enough to re-deploy it again. Selling it off to a company focused on keeping advanced plugin modules the same for a decade, hasn't improved my trust in the forward thinking of its promise to a modern experience just yet. Time will tell of course. I only hope the commitment to user feedback will remain the same, if not grow a little bit. And we can reestablish a Git Hub presence again. The reason is simply because, it's a third party neutral zone to entice more people to come and find us worthy of a web presence to whom remains developing for a dying industry.
Yes you read that right. The web is a dying industry, due to too many other protocols making use of the internet. Everything from zoom meetings, to things like Matrix, Agora and Youtube Superchats occupying the time of people not otherwise focused on video games and watching news clips of how the world is falling apart. School attendance is at an all time low. And the general consensus is that we need to rebuild in the wake of our own change, to be recognized and noticed for innovation, not stagnation.
The fight is on attention. And if you haven't already noticed, not even buying several dozen domains can change this. If you see now days, people are focused on shopping, eating and vying for space on conflicted zones competing for the right of someone's attention. If you don't have it as quick as possible, you lose it as soon as possible.
But with my general concerns aside, I do hope you see this and make some changes to ensure that people will keep relevance at bay while the internet shifts itself around the needs of those who rely on things like Tick Tock, activism and infrastructure battles. Perhaps Social Engine could best be served right now, as being catering to news, and if more APIs are added, videos. The best made plugins ever sold, are the ones that use Patreon like styles of information to push content to people based on recommended playlist like feeds. I think that this is how we can ensure people remain connected to the web in enticing ways. So long as the content at its source, is delivered as fast and with as few code as possible.
Elshara, I've written a whole novella in response to your post. Now I have to edit it, but in short until I can come back, just wanted to reach out and say thank you for all that you shared. All very important thoughts, points and future planning to consider in competing with other platforms. ~T.
Thank you truly for the support you have shown me. I knew something had to be said.
Like many of you, none of us, including myself, have anticipated the fall of search traffic in favour of everyone trying to prefer mini services and micro group notifications. The slow yet steady emergence of Artificial Intelligence, or as it is more accurately called, suggestive branding. Has been powering business and consumer decisions for about a decade at this point.
this has been a growing trend showing no signs of stopping. Ever since smart phones became known for replacing consumer tasks on a computer. All the while keeping those most in favour of communicating with one another, happy to do so. For that matter, with the means to access personal, exclusive content based on mutual interests. Not to mention similar journeys taken together with others of like mind using only phone apps.
As these apps developed, the web turned its focus largely from knowledge in a public domain, to cashing out on the original HTTP investments. Ones which made existing information hubs popular since the 1990s. These gradually started promoting the use of virtual exclusion zones on everything from blogging sites, to active forums. As they would be now infamous across the web for introducing everything from video game like levels of subscriber access. To financial terms for membership access. All in an effort to sustain growth margins and keep their existing visitor traffic somewhat engaged.
Little did they realize, that over time, this in and of itself would become both under valued and over reaching. People these days, have seen the light in terms of phone apps, replacing everything from desktop shortcuts on their computer to the need to own a laptop at all. What makes this worse, is that for the desktop market to remain engaged. Many phone apps, like video games, Tick Tock and Telegram, have all migrated over to web versions of private, micro groups. Where everyone knows everyone on the platform they are friends with, which in and of itself, helps platforms grow.
To be blunt, this means your little fan site for sports equipment or selling local apples at a grocery store near by, is just not going to see the light of day. Search engines lower the ranking of sites nobody cares to search for by category so much, that their internal priorities revolve around serving those who pay them the most to list a site capable of corporate traffic scalability. And this is usually done for a specific purpose, based on regional popularity.
As more virtual spaces get created which are private, there's a greater chance that the once infamous name of 'dark web' may now be seen as a kind of grey area blocked from practically anyone accept for your eyes only. So much so, that if you tried convincing a neighbour who you rarely speak with, by means of a tea shirt displayed on your person if you physically met for the first time. About your social network you run, their response, will be to ignore it completely. In favour of who is pulling them in, to their own virtual space. I would even go as far to say, that you yourself can't survive a day without being pulled into your own private communication with someone using a phone app of some kind.
This never used to be the case. There was a time, when the web was so relatively new, that any mention of it, made everyone follow your lead on what you were doing there. this is because before everyone started charging for exclusivity, the inclusive nature of growth, meant that curiosity was the leading authority in getting information shared with larger groups of people wanting in on the scoop. Sadly, now days, such innocence has been replaced with the need to grab both attention and ego around the attention you do have. As huge news sites are collapsing in favour of smaller niche news networks, ranging in differences of opinion from politics to styles of clothing. You won't find common ground in people coming together to comment on anything significant anymore. Unless, the topic of conversations has you in its widest field of vision.
It seems that along the way, this has caused the most harm to the sites that Social Engine and other related apps, specialize in building content around. Unless, you are able to prioritize suggestive content to people who are asked on what they enjoy the most. this is the only way that any kind of online community will keep, and perhaps even restore, its meaning our lives today.
Having said that, social networks, as a whole, including forums, generally speaking, have evolved into something not compelling enough to participate in over all. Contrast this with 10 years ago, and they were literally at the forefront of the achievement of web traffic and online posting.
I have long since suspected that many companies are trying to cash in on long standing reputations of doing very little over time. Companies such as Apple for example, can only get away with it because their hardware has been able to host the apps people enjoy using the most. Please, don't let Social Engine be dead in 5 years. We've paid too much into this product already for things to deteriorate completely.
We need to take the opening of doors content curation has presented us with, and perhaps even link up with larger rings of services to let the flood gates truly open as they are meant to. Otherwise corporations will take our last stand away from us, crushing virtual small to medium sized communities into Facebook groups.
Who is with me for a better Social Engine this time around?
The future is wide open for those with the vision to see and compete in the changing landscape. We need to not only prioritize technology, but also the direction it is headed socially as you said, Elshara. This follows on our conversation a few months ago about the direction SE was headed before the acquisition by SNS. Stay on top of the tech AND social direction and SE will be a winner. The resources and personnel will now be available so it's time to jump on the horse and not get bucked off.
After more than 8 months of waiting, we can see that we were right and anticipated this situation.
By taking a dominant position and buying SE, SES totally stunned
its competitors who are currently unable to CORRECTLY update their Addons for version 6.2.
We've been waiting months for patches and upgraded 1 of our sites to 6.2 yesterday.
A real disaster. Nothing is working properly. It's a total fiasco.
Not to mention our customers who think we are fools unable to manage
our sites correctly. And we have our own IT department! So imagine
the simple content creator who would like to open a social network. It's simply
impossible.
SES's rush to release version 6.0 rendered the market obsolete.
Not to mention those useless addons like Travel, Business etc... which are so basic
they are absolutely useless.
Just look at the forum which today has become completely deserted.
(Thanks to Donna for still staying the course...)
While we were all waiting for deep changes like the display of blocks by level
of members that would monetize the sites correctly. Just to talk about
this functionality that even the oldest CMS have had for a very long time.
Ditto for SEO. A site does not exist without natural referencing.
Existing SEO systems are useless and they still cannot be changed
the URLs of addons which are systematically in English and ridiculous on the
European or Asian markets.
Social networks have become "has been" and suffer from the disaffection of Internet users
who today prefer other media that are much easier to use like Tinder
or Tiktok. Facebook is the first to be impacted by its own heaviness and complicated interface
use.
Result of the races, no more investment and purchase of licenses to open new
sites, no more purchase of Addons, reduction of staff... because the money does not enter correctly
in the funds and the sites are stagnating and obviously reorientation of our development
to Wordpress which portends other possibilities for development.
Thank you for trying to make our eyes shine, but we have to eat every day.
We will not work with SES because we are loyal to our suppliers and we are not
not carpet merchants. You are totally out of step with the reality of the market
and monetizing a site with SE has become virtually impossible.
On one of our sites, we lost in less than 6 months more than $100,000 just because
that the tastes of users change and that you do not know how to anticipate and consolidate
addon contributors which was vital for SE. (Already there were few...)
Seriously think about simplifying, strengthening this CMS with serious features
and expected by customers. Wake up ! The world changes
Thank you all for your sympathy through all these years.
Lovea said:
After more than 8 months of waiting, we can see that we were right and anticipated this situation.
By taking a dominant position and buying SE, SES totally stunned
its competitors who are currently unable to CORRECTLY update their Addons for version 6.2.
This is not the fault of SocialEngine or SNS. I will explain more later in this post.
We've been waiting months for patches and upgraded 1 of our sites to 6.2 yesterday.
A real disaster. Nothing is working properly. It's a total fiasco.
Not to mention our customers who think we are fools unable to manage
our sites correctly. And we have our own IT department! So imagine
the simple content creator who would like to open a social network. It's simply
impossible.SES's rush to release version 6.0 rendered the market obsolete.
Not to mention those useless addons like Travel, Business etc... which are so basic
they are absolutely useless.Just look at the forum which today has become completely deserted.
(Thanks to Donna for still staying the course...)
I'm sorry you didn't like the Travel, Employment, and Business addons I made for SE. They were requested by other clients who asked for the Classified plugin to be cloned. I did that and then added improvements to them such as how Likes work, some design changes, etc. The other clients who asked for them were pleased.
We did not RUSH to release v6. It was well overdue. We even had closed beta testing with third party experts and a few clients.
We HAD to release v6 as browsers dropped support for mootools which was causing SEPHP to not work. Removing mootools was a massive effort. We also had to custom update ZEnd which was no longer working with some translations and with some newer APi's. This was causing areas of SEPHP to no longer function. If we had not released, SEPHP would no longer be working in Chrome or Firefox at all.
We informed third party experts in the private developer area of the changes coming. We gave some of them access to test v6 to see the new changes and help us bug test. We released beta versions before stable, in order to also give third party experts more time to update their plugins.
If they are not removing Mootools, this is on them to correct. They must remove mootools as the browsers do not support it. This is on browser updates. This is why SEPHP would not work with Mootools.
Yes, the forum is quiet. That is unfortunate and sad but it could be from many reasons.
While we were all waiting for deep changes like the display of blocks by level
of members that would monetize the sites correctly. Just to talk about
this functionality that even the oldest CMS have had for a very long time.
This will require even more massive updating which is in the roadmap.
Ditto for SEO. A site does not exist without natural referencing.
Existing SEO systems are useless and they still cannot be changed
the URLs of addons which are systematically in English and ridiculous on the
European or Asian markets.
This is in the roadmap.
Social networks have become "has been" and suffer from the disaffection of Internet users
who today prefer other media that are much easier to use like Tinder
or Tiktok. Facebook is the first to be impacted by its own heaviness and complicated interface
use.Result of the races, no more investment and purchase of licenses to open new
sites, no more purchase of Addons, reduction of staff... because the money does not enter correctly
in the funds and the sites are stagnating and obviously reorientation of our development
to Wordpress which portends other possibilities for development.Thank you for trying to make our eyes shine, but we have to eat every day.
We will not work with SES because we are loyal to our suppliers and we are not
not carpet merchants. You are totally out of step with the reality of the market
and monetizing a site with SE has become virtually impossible.On one of our sites, we lost in less than 6 months more than $100,000 just because
that the tastes of users change and that you do not know how to anticipate and consolidate
addon contributors which was vital for SE. (Already there were few...)Seriously think about simplifying, strengthening this CMS with serious features
and expected by customers. Wake up ! The world changesThank you all for your sympathy through all these years.
Thank you for your feedback. Everything you mention has been on the roadmap for years. I even have special "mindmaps" for plugin updates that will even be able to compete with WordPress, VanillaForum, etc but we have to make major core improvements in order to do these things. We do have it in our map - roadmap. We do have our eye on the times. We do have our clients in mind and our third party experts who all want big changes. They wanted bootstrap. We put bootstrap in v6.
We are a bit stuck with zend but we are custom updating it as fast as we can without causing more issues. It takes a lot of testing. The v6 zend update made the script faster, allowed for some improvements that weren't possible before, etc. The block issue you mentioned, we hope we can do something like that once we update zend again.
Third party experts have had many months to update and remove mootools from their products. This is required in order for them to work. Also, with bootstrap for themes, they can even make the blocks/widgets better by using bootstrap technology. You should be posting about your third party experts in a separate thread in the third party area so that we, and they, can provide more details.
Next time would you please start a new thread for feedback like this? It will help for searches when someone wants to search for this specific topic.
We always appreciate all of our clients and we do empathize with the situation. If you look at the bug fixes and improvement lists in each release, you'll see quite a lot of work. Note that there are also behind the scenes improvements and fixes that are not always listed so, there's even more work done than is seen in the blogs.
Hello,
Sadly, many problems aren't from SE or third parts creators, many times issues come also from the server configuration.
I have been one with a huge sequel of issues caused by the update. Half website was not working at all, took 2 months to fix everything and indeed I have lost tons of conversions, as don't mention our active users not very happy.
But what can I say, is in these situations it is even better to create a develop server to do all the tests.
I can say only my experience and this show us is better having a separate configuration for that. What I can say is that the need to have to change all the product key to activate plugins for development caused to us to make impossible to have a well working development system.
This part must be worked for sure better because in situations more evolved than a simply working server, may need to pay more attention on that, because it will solve many problems caused to update the active working platform.
So, is sometimes not only a problem of the software itself, but also from the server configuration, the issues related to "troubles" during the upgrading process (HDD failures, low latency between server and database, and many other physical issues).
Yes, SNS have acquired Socialengine, but they work hard and very well, is thanks to them and my needs to move the S3 to a different location that was found a bug affecting it.
Still thanks to them, we found some minor, but that was fixed, since before they acquired SE.
To don't mention my high expectations, they try to solve all the time. Or when I have to showcase the system to investors, and they do all the efforts to fix anything quickly to let me having the possibility to showcase it at the best.
And many times I feel like the guinea pig hahaha, but it is normal, so please don't be angry, but try to look forward finding what can cause errors and how to help them to address to these errors, because if you can address to the issue, they can find solutions not only for you, but for the whole community.
Chees
Piero
It is true that I was not very positive in my remarks
but it seems fair to me. Even if it is written with annoyance and frustration.
Concerning the new addons Business, Travel... I understand that some
people need these modules. We hadn't thought of this scenario.
Anyway, it's our fault, we should have waited longer
and check that everything was ok. Version 5.9 worked fine.
Glad to know that displaying blocks by member level is
in progress. This is a major and essential point to monetize
a website. Because currently it is very difficult to block certain sections
to non-paying members.
It's just vital.
Finally, thank you for your progress and pray that contributors adapt their Addons quickly.
Have a good day.