All about Skalfa web-projects.
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
Monday, December 8th, 2008
I’m sorry to inform you that adult social networks on WackWall will temporarily stop supporting video sharing. Currently we only have YouTube option for video hosting. It automatically requires any video that you upload to comply with their terms of use.
Although not all videos that are being uploaded on adult networks violate these terms but generally the understandable non-compliance is currently taking place that is why we had to turn it off completely for the time being until we introduce self-hosted (or at least embeddable 3rd party) video option.
Thank you for understanding.
Posted in Projects, WackWall | Tags: video
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
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Let me congratulate all Skalfa employees and customers with this important date. We just turned 4 years!
There are a lot of complexities in running a social tech company and we’ve eaten a lot of them during all this time learning to produce the software that solves people’s needs and supporting their businesses. As we move forward our vision clears out, our operations get more streamlined, and our focus gets even sharper as Skalfa capitalizes on its niche and shows steady growth.
I’m glad we made no layoffs since the nuclear winter start and don’t plan any in the nearest future. I can’t remember any moment in our history when we had a better team than now. That’s a fascinating feeling when you see talents working on what they can do best of all.
We plan revolutionary upgrades for 2 of our products and at least 2 new product launches in the upcoming year. And we are starting with that right now. The world is going to see the result of our hard work in exactly 30 days. Well, some select customers are going to see it in just 15. 
Thanks for kicking with us!
Emil Sarnogoev
CEO
Skalfa eCommerce
Posted in FaceJuggle, News, Products, Projects, SkaDate, SkaLinks, Skalfa Ads, WackWall, chuPPo | Tags: birthday · company
Monday, November 10th, 2008
WackWall has now three new features:
1. HTML box allows you to add any content into the box. For example you may add your own advertisements and run them free of charge and get revenue.
2. RSS box – add news from your or other blogs it will help you attract new members and get activity on your network. You can always have fresh content on your theme even before your site gains members and activity.
3. Widget gallery with more than 70,000 widgets from Widgetbox. We integrated and tested the library with 70 thousand widgets not long ago into WackWall. Now this feature is officially available. You can choose any widget from the library and use them in your network. Your members will love them.
How to use:
To access three new features go to your network’s administration area -> under the Features/Layout section look to the right and you will see a box with “Custom components”-> drag and drop any of the feature into a desired block of your network -> click the icon of a screw key in front of the added feature -> follow the and hit the button Save Changes.
All three features can be used on the index page.
Your feedback or commetns are welcome.
Posted in WackWall |
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
We have finished the development of the new WackWall feature – it is the News section. All administrators or new social network creators at WackWall.com can post news on their networks by ticking off blog posts.
How to use this new feature:
Go to your network administration area -> Features layout -> Drag and drop “Site News” from the column “Add features” to your homepage -> click the button “Save changes”.
Then go to your main page and select the option to write a blog post. In the interface for writing a blog post you will see a check box “Mark as News” tick it off and your blog post will appear in the News section.
Share your thoughts about this new addition.
Posted in WackWall |
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Greetings to all WackWallers out there. It has been quiet in our camp for so long but only because we were preparing a lot of candies for you. Let me whisper to your ear that we just secretly released an important update to all social networking sites powered by WackWall. Shhhh!
1) New interface customization tool
That’s what we’ve been working for so long. Go to your network -> Admin -> Appearance. Instead of the old basic tool we now have 6 pages of various tools designated to let you easily change the look and feel of your site. What is significant is that we not only give you ability to write custom CSS code, the tool itself is also powerful enough to control a lot of details. This is what you can’t find on any hosted social network service. But don’t take it for truth, try it out yourself!
2) Collection of pre-defined templates
Together with the new interface customization we are proud to introduce a nice collection of templates. You can choose a template and continue customizing it to make your site look unique. This collection will grow constantly because our designers work on new diverse templates non-stop. Also, in future we will make template import/export system so people can trade their own templates on our WackWall webmasters network.
3) Video sharing by YouTube
We are happy to introduce the initial implementation of video sharing for all WackWall networks using YouTube hosting. It works like any regular video sharing feature and only uses YouTube disk space to host the files and computing power to encode videos. This means that your network will not consume additional disk space to host the videos.
In future we will elaborate native WackWall video sharing so those who want will benefit from faster video processing and getting rid of YouTube label on video player.
4) New Site creation wizard
And the last but not the least is that we offer a new social network creation wizard. It now consists of only one page and makes it’s even easier to create your own social networking site for any purpose free with WackWall. Which is what we recommend you to do right now.
We are getting close to our first 1,000 networks barrier. So all WackWall webmasters out there, you can now run to your social network administration area to view changes and let your users share video on your site. As always, your feedback is much welcome at http://dev.wackwall.com/!
Posted in News, Projects, WackWall | Tags: templates · video
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
After applying a minor feature update for WackWall we are experiencing difficulties with widgets on WackWall social networks. We got the index pages up shortly but widgets do not show up yet. We are working on the issue.
The ETA for getting widgets fully functional back again is 24 hours.
Update: All functionality brought back online but widgets. We will fix them during several days, including the week-end.
Posted in Projects, WackWall | Tags: widgets
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
Go run to your social network administration area on WackWall.
Then go to basic settings.
Then choose your own domain.com web-address.
Make sure your domain name is configured correctly.
Have fun with http://www.mynetwork.com instead of http://mynetwork.wackwall.com.
Nobody’s charging you for using it – all for FREE.
Posted in Projects, WackWall | Tags: custom · domain
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
As you might have noticed in the last few days we are performing maintenance updates on a daily basis introducing heaps of fixes, optimizations and enhancements to the whole WackWall platform, primarily for better and more stable functionality of social network sites created upon it.
Thus WackWall and your network on it become better every day. We have a nice long list of tiny details to work on. Think you can contribute to it? Always welcome!
So far you can track our status updates or subscribe for RSS feed.
On the other hand we have a roadmap of features to finish this summer:
- Integration of widget gallery from Widgetbox;
- Several native widgets like RSS feeds and custom HTML;
- Google account login;
- Contacts import from Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo;
- Video sharing;
- New, more powerful site appearance builder with a nice selection of predefined templates (themes).
Stay tuned for all the wonderful things coming to your social network with WackWall! We are all about delivering value to your community users so let us know if we can do a better job of building a cool destination for them.
Posted in Projects, WackWall | Tags: maintenance · roadmap · updates
