Here are posts that do not fit other categories.
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Although introduced not so long ago, the sms-billing service has been coming to the fore among the well-known and trustworthy payment methods. What is the reason for its growing popularity?
It’s pretty easy to explain by turning to any customer’s psychology: they want to get goods and services quickly, safely and not having to go through a 
number of sophisticated steps. SMS-billing meets all these requirements providing security along with mobility. No need to expose the credit card details, no need to wait for the transaction to be completed – with sms-payment you get what you want instantly, no need to think about cash – short messages are relatively cheap, and you take these expenses as a part of your monthly telephone bill (which is also an important psychological aspect).
This payment method is convenient and beneficial not only for consumers (site members in our case), but also for vendors. First of all, if you are on the second team, it gives you an opportunity to make the subscription for your site easier and more affordable. Imagine the situation with a Free member, who receives an offer from another user to chat tête-a-tête, but his membership does not include the private messaging service. Most people being in his shoes would prefer paying only for this particular feature (by pressing a few buttons on their mobile device and getting instant access to the desired service) as opposed to purchasing the monthly membership through one of the online payment providers, which would take more time, trouble and funds. Well, I would… as well as the major part of the European countries’ population. It does not mean that sms-payments have to be a substitute for your traditional membership plans, but they can be a great add-on to the process of monetizing your online dating business. A simple calculation shows that depending on the number of your site members and the fee you set up for the site services, you could get hundreds to thousands dollars daily on top of income from subscriptions.
Representing a well-known software company – which is SkaDate – I can’t help saying a few words about how we follow the sms-boom tendency developing new features for our community script and dating software. SkaDate 7 dating software programmers introduced a number of new useful features for members, including the sms-billing. For now it does not cover a wide range of site services: only ‘hot list’ and ‘24-hour trial membership’. We are studying the response of our audience (since our product is mostly USA-oriented) in order to decide if we should go ahead with expanding this feature. But in case you decide to be on the pacesetters team offering the sms-billing service on their sites to show all its advantages to the members, SkaDate team will gladly help you with this. There are 2 world-famous sms-payment providers already integrated into our script: DaoPay and Zong. So to customize the software for adding more items into the list of site features paid by sms will be a lot easier (since the sms billing system itself is 
already present in the program). You could modify the script by yourself (if you have enough coding knowledge), or leave that to our high-skilled developers team. Another option is visiting the SkaDate Certified Specialists website – the guys who know the product really well and provide high quality assistance on any script modifications.
Logically, we have come up to the moment, where I should start speaking about the disadvantages of using sms-billing for your online venture. One is that this payment method is yet to strike root in the USA, where people still prefer tried-and-true PayPal, CCBill and Authorize.net… And for now I can’t think of any more cons, so if you have thoughts on this aspect – you are most welcome to share them by leaving the post comments.
I am looking forward to reading your responses!
Best wishes,
Irene
Posted in Miscellaneous, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating · dating software · payment method · SkaDate · SMS billing · software
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
Buddypress is an interesting open source community platform project. It got some traction and there a lot of users who like Buddypress more than any other alternatives on the table.
On the other hand I think it’s a seriously misled effort.
First of all, it’s based on Wordpress MU and here I smell the biggest trouble in the air. Andy Peatling is putting a lot of work to base social network features on top of the stagnant and underdeveloped Wordpress MU (looks like only Donncha works on it?) which is a complex platform unintended for what Buddypress developers do with it. Buddypress is essentially hacking Wordpress MU into something it doesn’t want to do and it takes to be a good hacker to do that.
The second suspicious thing is the decisions Andy makes to just keep it going. Read the first two paragraphs about complexity of Wordpress and decision to have logic functions in themes and your nose will feel the same as mine.
The third thing is that Wordpress MU already brings a lot to the table but there’s no guarantee you’ll need it that way. You think the 2 user consoles (one from Wordpress, and one from Buddypress) above the site content are any good? Is this a compromise you agree to make for the sake of using Wordpress plugins?
During my career I’ve been involved in a couple of projects that were started the same wrong way. You take some framework or existing project to “save time on developing trivial features”. You have some head start and agree with limitations it trades for. Inevitably you grow unhappy with those limitations because of the nature of complex systems. If you play it nice with the platform – I mean doing things the way it wants – it’s fine. But the more business logic you need the more clinical situations you face. The system tells you “It can’t be done your way – live with it”.
In the end of the day you might spend more time to get things stretched to work than to write everything from scratch. Also imagine results of both approaches. I’ve seen so much evidence that the don’t-write-what-somebody-else-wrote-100-times notion is as wrong as people-want-features one.
It makes perfect sense for Matt to have Buddypress in Automattic portfolio and it takes only one blog post to have Buddypress jump into the eyes of tens of millions bloggers of the world. But what’s the point? Is it to create a cool open source social platform or to show it can be done on Wordpress MU?
All in all Andy is showing a great deal of coolness in Buddypress user interfaces but I think he would better use his talent for a less troubled start (cough join OpenWack? cough). Buddypress devs will need so much extra guts to fight through Wordpress MU.
I may have done a poor homework of studying Buddypress and will appreciate if anybody clues me in in comments. But feedback like “The big drawback that I see right now is that the blog interface is pretty complex for a novice. I’ve been using Drupal for several years, and one of the things I like about it is that students don’t need any training in how to write a post on the course site. I can imagine them being overwhelmed by the wp dashboard, categories, tags, and the like.” already indicate you’re in trouble. Let along long term compatibility issues threats of two separate developments.
Anyone throw in tips of using Buddypress efficiently I’d love your input.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags: social platform · wordpress
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
SkaDate released a new dating software build – SkaDate 7.1201. The main features delivered in the SkaDate 7.1201 build are:
-Top rated blog lists
-Polls
-French and Italian languages
-Three new community and dating templates
-Custom Backgrounds admin approve tool
-IM/Chat Smiles;
-FavIcon
-Members’ photo count;
-Paging for Friend Lists;
- Apply photo watermark to all photos
-Admin photo upload tool
-My Saved Searches
- Latest Activity
- Status Line
Three new well designed templates: Color Touch II, Emotion and Dating Shine.
SkaDate presents three new templates for dating sites and social networks. Starting or running a social network and a dating web site seems to be a daunting task, but with the new great looking templates you may attract more members who will love your web site. SkaDate web designers sharpen their skills on continuing basis and gladden us with their artworks. Take a look at the templates:
Polls
Here are screen shots of the admin and user interfaces of the Pools feature. You may easily create a new poll and set particular answers to your questions. This feature is useful for collecting your members’ feedback which can be used for the analysis of their needs and desires.
Custom Backgrounds admin approve tool.
Sometimes it is necessary to check your members’ background images to prevent using copyrighted materials. Here are screen shots of the admin interface of this feature:
IM/Chat Smiles
Smiles is a common feature of a number instant messengers and chats on the net and now you may express your emotions by using smiles in SkaDate dating software chat and IM.
FavIcon
You may upload your favorite icon and your members will see it in a browser. SkaDate.com has its own favicon. Favicon maybe your logotype or any other picture you want to show in front of your web address.
Number of members photos.
This improvement helps your members to see how many photos a member has without looking at her profile.
Admin photo upload tool.
This feature was in SkaDate 6 and we recoded it for SkaDate 7 basing on customers’ feedback. Now administrators may upload photos to a member’s profile.
My Saved Searches
We made it easier for your members to save their searches. If your member finds a number of interesting profiles he may save the search and it will be available at his fingertips – Member Home page. He can look the profiles again and initiate contact with members at your dating web site or social network.
Latest activity.
Well this feature was long awaited by our customers and we developed it for them. I guess you know this feature from the famous FaceBook™ where you can see the activity of your friends and your activity will be shown to your friends as well. This status section displays the latest activity of your friends, take a look at the below screen shot.
Status line.
This feature is also cool and you can type anything you have in your mind thereby express your mood. Your updates will be shown in the latest activity at your friends’ member home pages. In my mind the status line feature is a perfect feature that will appeal to a set of users.
The build also includes several dating software enhancements and minor fixes. As always SkaDate professionally trained web developers made a good job and developed a number of useful features for online dating web sites and social networks. Feel free to check SkaDate 7 Demo.
SkaDate 7.1201 is a free build to SkaDate 7 license owners and is available for use.
What are your thoughts on the 7.1201 build, and which features are you most interested in using? Please share your opinion.
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating software · dating templates · online dating · SkaDate
Friday, March 6th, 2009
Today I am going to cover two major things we have for you. The first thing is about the new build of SkaDate dating software and community script – SkaDate 7.1081. This build contains new features, improvements and minor fixes. SkaDate 7 developers prepared the following interesting features for SkaDate license owners:
XML Sitemap automatic generator. Now SkaDate 7 dating software will be more search engine friendly due to the XML sitemap which will be automatically generated each time users create profiles, forum topics, blogs, photos and etc. You just need to submit your SkaDate web site’s XML site map to Google via Webmasters tools (Google webmasters). This XML Sitemap will help Google, Yahoo and other search engines to crawl and index your web site consequently you get more positions in search results. Read more about XML Sitemaps.
SMS billing. SkaDate 7 dating software and community script now has sms billing. This is a long-awaited feature. SkaDate 7 supports the following SMS billing payment providers: DaoPay.com and Zong.com You get an account at one of the mentioned sms billing payment providers and your members can pay for these services: Hot List (profiles at the sidebar) and 24 hours trial membership. We think to develop other services for sms billing but a bit later. This feature will help you to increase your revenue through getting real-time payments for your web site’s services from your members. A number of customers prefer to pay for online services by sms and not to share their credit card information. You may reach additional number of customers from your target audience. Try out SkaDate 7 dating software Demo
Profile view customization feature has been improved. Now you may easily change the color of your profile background or customize the background with a picture.
Classifieds are now available in SkaDate 7. Your members can easily advertise their services, sell things, post jobs in the section for classifieds. Other members can add bids and add comments to posted classifieds. It’s a useful feature to interest your members and involve them into social networking and even help them to earn money while being your web site’s members. You will find Classifieds at SkaDate 7 Demo http://www.skadate.com/demo/classifieds.php
Mail system and Cron improvement. We changed the priority of mailing letters to users in SkaDate 7. Now welcome and verification letters will be sent at high priority. As for mass mailing and activity scheduler letters they will be sending every 30 minutes.
3 new cool templates are available in this build plus we adjusted old templates to IE-7. Check them here.
Second thing is about the changes in pricing for SkaDate additional licenses, prices for design integration and designing a unique template.
Design integration price has been reduced from $1000 to $400. Designing a unique template price has been also reduced from $3000 to $1000. We reduced the prices due to the simplicity of the new way of template integration introduced in this SkaDate update. You can have a unique design from SkaDate designers or integrate your design – now it’s even more affordable!
Discounts for SkaDate 7 dating software packages. Now if you buy additional license of SkaDate 7 dating software solution or managed solution you get discounts. Here are the discounted prices for additional SkaDate dating software packages:
| SkaDate Software Solution |
SkaDate Managed Solution |
1st license – $795
2nd license – $695
3rd license – $595 |
1st license – $395
2nd license – $295
3rd license – $195 |
I guess it’s enough for now. Our technical team works hard and in the next build will be available one more important feature for social networking and dating web sites – groups. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to leave your comments.
Thank you for your attention and consideration.
Regards, Tim.
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, SkaDate | Tags: dating software · design integration · discounts · new build · release · SkaDate · SMS billing · unique design · XML sitemap
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
I’m writing this message to reveal the Skalfa master plan for this year. 2009 is here and I want to share the most significant parts of it with you.
First of all, I’m proud that we didn’t suffer any layoffs in the current global economic climate. Skalfa entered its 5th year of existence as a securely profitable entity with stable market positions and steady growth. Another thing that I want to specially mark is the talents we have on our tank. When you have so much bright people under one roof there’s something amazing got to be born.
SkaDate
So far we have achieved remarkable footprint in the small community business market with our flagship product, SkaDate. Our recent release of SkaDate 7 is already showing the world the new level of community tools, showing us the next stage of community management problems, and the new objectives for the development of the product. In 2009 SkaDate will continue extending its feature set but will also integrate several solutions from 3rd parties, such as SMS billing, scam/fraud control tools, image tools, background checks, etc. This is an important step to take in the direction of helping businesses decide their actual problems, not merely providing technical tools. Another important aspect of SkaDate development is refining and fine-tuning the existing features. This is where we hugely rely on customer feedback, and SkaDate 7 is the result.
To extend the portfolio of services to support SkaDate we are working on creating SkaDate Marketplace – a place where certified specialists can offer their services to the end users. Finally, we are looking into signing several deals with software companies for custom development partnership on the base of SkaDate. We think that the diversity of service offers for SkaDate is going to create huge benefit for the customers and will contribute to our goal – producing more quality online dating sites.
WackWall, OpenWack
Let me use this opportunity to shed some light on the current state of things with the two projects: OpenWack, and WackWall.
Currently we are working on the new OpenWack platform which is going to be the new engine for WackWall, and also available as an open source community software package under the GPL license. Yes, Skalfa eCommerce enters free software market this year. We are actively working on the prototypes and concepts.
WackWall is going to stay a place where you can create your own social network or online collaboration/communication tool within minutes, absolutely free. Being based on OpenWack platform is going to greatly diversify its features, possibilities, and purposes of use. Expect the major boost of these with the WackWall 2.0 relaunch on the OpenWack platform.
OpenWack is planned to highly rely on 3rd party development and support. We will have more details for you on that later.
Other Skalfa projects
While working on major projects we always worked on several minor ones. Those are for our own needs, value-added services for the existing solutions, and simply tiny useful products that are fun to develop. Expect some shutdowns and launches from us this year because we have to keep focus on things we do best of all – building impressive community tools, and at the same time we need to enhance our offers with value-added services.
2009 is the year that every entity must keep laser-sharp focus on the core of its business. Take this global recession as not a slowdown but a chance to streamline your operations, clear out your goals, reduce costs, and find new opportunities for your business. We are proud to work with you.
Thank you,
Emil Sarnogoev
CEO
Skalfa eCommerce
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, Products, Projects |
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
Merry Christmas everybody! We wish 2009 to be the best year for your endeavors and your business effort. Economy may be down but there’s every reason for your business to be up! Good luck!
We are to roll out our main present to you today 
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, Products, SkaDate | Tags: christmas
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
I’ve been thinking about the situation with Ning shutting down adult social networks on its platform.
The problem with free hosted services for social networks is the same with Ning. It’s only a matter of time when your interests go against theirs – monetary, ideological, or whatever else. At least nobody owes you anything – it’s free, what the hell. Nobody approaches your individual problems – this is one reason you can find yourself moving to another place again.
I believe this time people will be more careful with choosing provider for their community sites. One ground rule here is not to change one “walled garden” (a closed place where your community depends on business decisions that the service owners make) for another. Sure, Ning claims that you can get a running copy of your site with your members and data but Ning proved that not to be the case. Currently they have problems with even meaningfully exporting your data. If they had any success with that no adult communities would be seeking new providers now.
Exporting members to another place is evil – you don’t know who many members will survive it. You need to get them to actually respond to your newsletter by moving their activity to the new site, you need to have them get used to changes which every provider has. How many members are you going to lose? 50%? 80%?
1) If you do not see too much value in time invested in growing your community – you can move on and find one of services similar to Ning.
2) If you want control and guarantees you need to bear with the thought that it costs money. A solution like SkaDate might be the choice, given that it has a no-brainer hosted social network site solution. This is freedom. At any point you can opt out for an independent set up, so this is where you stop moving your community between providers.
3) If you want both free and control that’s where you choose WackWall. Solving the problem of free hosted solution and independence is one of the major reasons we are introducing WackWall 2.0 relaunch soon. I will follow up on this specific topic later.
This time the choice should be made by you – not your platform provider. Time and effort to grow a community is your main resource, I believe it should be put on top of your priority list before you start digging again.
Good luck with that.
Posted in Miscellaneous, Projects, WackWall | Tags: move · SkaDate
Friday, December 5th, 2008
A lot of people seem to be pissed off about Ning shutting down adult sites. Sure, this is their service and they can do what they want with it. I just see red lights flashing all around the company (sorry for pun).
Ning started adopting cut-off-end-of-story policy in the recent time. The first precedent was when they shut down WidgetLaboratory. And plenty of Ning sites as a side-effect. WidgetLaboratory was as pissed off as they could and started crying foul. Ning didn’t seem to care. Michael Arrington called WidgetLaboratory idiots for posting private correspondence that didn’t support their case. I’m not in a position to judge who was right, there was a lot of heat about that. I suspect Ning to have been on a firmer ground but it all doesn’t matter. Only does the fact that a lot of social network sites went down – those using WidgetLaboratory widgets. It took 3 days to only hear something from Ning. Let alone putting sites back online. If you plan to turn off a misbehaving partner make sure your customers do not suffer or at least do not beg any word from you about why you sent them offline.
Now we have this – Ning will no longer support adult sites. Admitting the fact that they have no idea of monetizing adult sites they point you at the door. No assistance except for finding out about issues of exporting data. Let alone as-smooth-to-move-as-possible alternative solution.
Shutting down sites can make as much business sense as one can eat. I just don’t seem to like the idea that your community with all your time and effort investment can go down as a result of a brief business meeting in the host company with cut-em-off decision. They don’t know you, they don’t see how hard it is to gather like-minded people to build real conversations, so the decision comes easy. You’re no longer with them. As well as countless other sites. Ning can play monopolist and heavily moderate comments on blogs and forums while they see no real value in webmasters who made the service popular in the first place.
I liked one saying by somebody (if you know the source let me know I will link to it) about free hosted social network solutions (and Ning in particular): “In a perfect world it means that there’s someone else to care about software, updates, hosting and uptime. In the real world it means that your community is at the company’s mercy.” Speaking about Ning’s case I can’t agree more.
Maybe it’s time to take control for those webmasters who invest so much time in developing their communities. One answer is an affordable and independent managed community site solution from SkaDate. If you want control while not diving into technical distractions that’s the way to go.
On the other hand, WackWall is going to offer an interesting twist for retaining control. Being a free hosted social network service it’s going to offer to go independent with your original site and all your members, custom mods and template without any downtime whatsoever. I’m going to cover more details with soon-to-come WackWall 2.0 launch. Watch the news and good luck with your post-Ning roaming. Maybe it’s all for good.
Posted in Miscellaneous, Projects, WackWall | Tags: adult · migrate · ning · SkaDate
Thursday, December 4th, 2008
Skalfa eCommerce, dating and social networking software development company, launched a Christmas special offer, “Buy SkaDate and Save up $$$“.
Buy SkaDate and Save up $$$ is a limited time offer from Skalfa eCommerce which starts today 4th of December and will be available until the 25th of December 2008. Now all who wished to build own dating site or social networking web site has a unique chance to buy SkaDate with the discount and save money.
SkaDate is a social network and online dating software platform. SkaDate presents the latest high quality software technology with up-to-date features and applications for dating or social networking business. The software has free dating and social networking templates which can be changed from the administration panel. There are two packages: Standalone solution comes with the unencrypted source code and the Hosted solution
Buy SkaDate 6 with the discount and save your $$$.
SkaDate 6 Managed Solution special $250 (regular price $295).
SkaDate 6 Software Solution special $750 (regular price $795).
Total savings:
Managed Solution: $45.
Software Solution: $45.
Valid from the 4th of December 2008 until the 25th of December 2008.
Treat yourself this festal season and enjoy this Xmas special.
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, SkaDate | Tags: special offer
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Why do you need relevant ads? The answer is that you get a target group of visitors who will more likely to respond to advertisements on a specific theme. To run advertisements on your web site is an art of strategy. You need to choose what ads you want to show to your visitors on your web site then think about the advantages and count the cost.
Let’s start with pay-per-click advertisements (PPC).
There are different companies which offer pay-per-click ads the most popular Google Adsense and Yahoo publisher network. All of them have different approaches of getting their ads relevant on content web sites. Relevant ads mean that if a visitor goes to a page for example video chat he/she will see a relevant advertisement of a video chat on an advertisers’ web site. If that visitor clicks on the advertisement the owner of the content web site will get a commission.
The following tips will help you to locate relevant ads on your web site pages:
1. Reconsider the keywords you have in the meta section, page titles and content of your web site this will help AdSense to place relevant ads.
2. If you want to get particular ads on a page which should be different from the main theme of the web site then I would recommend that you scan words which are repeated in your headers, sidebars, menus and change undesirable words.
3. Keep in mind that you may see different ads on your web site from your side because advertisers use geo targeting.
4. If you get irrelevant ads it means that your web site is not old enough and at the beginning you may get social non-paid ads. Or use a tool for blocking irrelevant ads for example Google’s Competitive Ad filter.
5. Think about the right positions for your ads. It is simple as you see ads during a prime time on TV or listen to the radio while driving a car.
If you want to learn more about how to efficiently use advertisements on your web site then check into it here:
1. 5-factors that determine your advertising cpm rates.
2. How-to-use-adsense-custom-channels.
3. How to use channels effectively to help you increase your adsense revenue.
Share your techniques how you use online advertisements on your web site.
Posted in Marketing, Miscellaneous, SkaDate | Tags: ads · adsense · SkaDate · tips
