AbleSpace and AbleDating (social network & dating software) has all the professional features that will be enough for you to create sites like YouTube, MySpace or Date.com in one package. I’ll review them a little bit below.
It has been developed by Abk-Soft, US Company with Russian roots and employing dynamic staff of over 30 freelance programmers from Russia managed from US.
Their main product contains lot of interesting modules, like 3D virtual city, Flash technology based profile editor to replace HTML, CSS profile customization, Video Chat, Video Sharing, Friends, Groups, Flash postcards, VoiIP technology based telephone, Flash based chat rooms, Flash games, Romantic virtual 3D chat rooms, Greeting recordings, Classifieds, Photo Gallery, Personal Blogs, Biorhythms, Love Match calculator, Instant Messenger, Mailbox, MP3 Player, favourites, forums, etc.
The administration allows setup the site for various community purposes, allowing three level memberships, affiliate programs, banner rotations, free trial memberships, newsletters, auto approvals, unlimited number of languages, e-mail and phone number automatic filtering, etc. Currently it supports PayPal, WorldPay, GoldPay, 2CO, NetBilling and PaySystems gateways but can be configured to any payment gateway for small fee.
Their templates based architecture allows changing site look and feel instantly using growing number of ready-made templates.
The installation service is free or if you want to do it yourself, its five simple steps following the screen and can be completed in minutes.
The product comes from two versions:
Existing site owners can also buy their 3D city module to any of site for $400.
Able Space social networking software
The main page starts with cool online videos, new videos and cool new people. It contains also special notice messages, direct links to site functions and to success stories, site tour and site info pages.
The site main functions are 3DCity, voting other members by their pictures, viewing photo albums, videos, making friends, 3DChat, online chat, blog, forum, groups and events.
The registration for Able Space social community site will ask your date of birth and your sexual gender besides email, username and password which was odd but common for dating sites. As next step you are able to upload your photo or skip this step and you are ready to go.
From your profile page besides your statistics, you are able to view your biorhythms, upgrade your membership, edit your profile, upload photos/videos/audio and hide profile.
Users are able to perform search from other members and view latest members directly from your member profile page.
You are able to write the headline and essay about themselves to their profile and there where no questions about my favourite movies, books and music to answer.
As next step, you are able to upload your photos, audio and videos or write a blog.
Members are also able to setup their personal settings, like email notifications for user mails, user interest, and subscription of newsletters, automatic login, change the password and hide or delete the profile.
When viewing other profiles, users are able to send mail, send a wink, send a postcard, add to favorites, send IM, start a video chat or phone conversation and play the game.
Site members can be searched by several criterias using basic or advance search, search can be saved and results sorted by rating either in profile view, gallery view or list view.
The online section gives the list of users currently online, using IM, new users, birthdays, featured users, users I viewed and users who have viewed me and from rating section, you are able to rate other member picture as Oh, No; No, Thanks; Better Not; Well, Maybe; Nice!, You’re Hot and Oh, Yes.
From the friends section, I was able to send Invite friends emails and list users from same criteria as from online section but I didn’t figure out how I can I invite others to be my friends.
Mails can be organized to folders and mail section shows also winks sent and received. You can select persons who have sent winks and whom you have sent winks to be added to your favorites and organize your favorites list.
For music files, besides the song name and description, users are able to add a picture. Somehow all those music files where starting to play as playlist and I wasn’t able to figure out how I can search and find other music. So maybe this was only mentioned to my personal music collection.
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osTube www.ostube.de is a social networking media platform allowing the sharing of music, video, pictures and documents. It has been developed by AUVICA GmbH in Munich, Germany. Their other product lines are MyRadio, Reisepanne, and VIMP.
osTube is available by three product editions: Community, Professional and Enterprise. Community edition is free but you can’t run any ads and social networking communities with it. The Professional edition allows banner and video (priced differently) ads as Enterprise edition is a not priced solution for commercial projects which can include Live Streaming, Mobile payments, etc.
Professional edition costs $149 to manage Google AdSense ads with some extra templates and you should spend $299 when you want to run video ads and have more templates included.
Installation and configuration.
AUVICA promised us a test environment and without their help, I would not have been able to get the product running at all. The upload and distribution of files went quickly but afterwards I ended up with list of Apache Linux settings errors that I was unable to change without a console access besides modifying directory rights using ftp. Even I downloaded the English version of the software, the installation and error messages where in German. So seems that not all installation messages where yet translated. I also encountered several spelling mistakes in English language version further.
When finally I was able to complete installation routines, I ended up “Insufficient Rights” SQL error when trying to access the administration module. Finally when they had fixed it I was able to use the administration module when logged in as “admin”.
When logged to the administration module, the first page shows all developers news and you re able to login to developers forum to seek help.
The users section allows to manage users, including a modification of their profile, lock users, give users administration or moderation rights, modify groups and configure the minimum length parameters for passwords, usernames, group names, etc. You can get a list of those users who have missing address data or e-mail address not verified.
From the module configuration settings, besides site parameters the administrator can setup the language (English, German) which sections (video, audio, pictures, documents) are in use, is member address required, is it visible, is birthday data visible, maximum upload size, notifications when media item has been reported, will the uploaded media and new users to be approved by administrator. There is also possibility to setup site metags, paths and video conversion settings.
The Layout section allows changing the templates, uploading site logo and changing portal objects colours. The administrator is able upload watermark supporting only PNG format.
The modules section allows configuring which kind of modules will appear in first page, including the news module where the administrator can enter a separate message for each section.
Banner management section in Professional edition allows to setup banner campaigns as “superbanner” (horizontal banner over the screen which can be shown in top, below the header or in bottom), “skyscraper” (vertical banner in the right side of the screen) or Extended. Using extended setup, I was able to setup Google Adsense which can be shown in all mentioned sections. The campaign options management allows defining the priority of banner ranging 1-100 scale, duration and which pages this banner will be shown. There where no possibility to setup certain amount of views or clicks. The banner statistics gives campaign views and clicks information including click thru ratio.
Site statistics shows top users, top media, top videos, top music, top pictures and top documents.
As the administrator I was able to design elements in home and community page, including setup the element width by dragging and dropping them. The screen seems to be divided to four columns. However those boxes somehow didn’t want to stay in the place where I wanted them to be.
Usability
The home page has sections Featured Video, Las added and Video Top 3, New Users with Picture, Latest messages, Chat, Top rated, Icon Description and Tag Cloud. The chat box button says “Send Mail”.
After the confirmation, new member is able to edit profile, upload media, edit friend list, manage groups, empty history or delete profile.
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PHPMotion is a truly free open source media social networking platform supporting video and audio social networking.
It’s downloadable from www.phpmotion.com website after you had registered to the software support forum.
Latest stable version was 1.2 but I tested and evaluated version 2 beta which worked without any crashes and with only small inconveniences.
The product installation was quick however you must have lot of open source modules pre-installed to your server, including LAME MP encoder, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder and MPlayer, FFMpeg-PHP, GD Library 2, etc. which was taking a week of my time to get those running afterwards to find out that my service provider does not support background processes and MP3, MPEG files download.
So you should consider the hosting service where those modules are already installed. PhpMotion website lists four of hosting ready service providers, where the starting price $2.99 was per month.
The administration panel allows setup the site basics and paths for ffmpeg, flvtool and mencoder, maximum sizes and parameters for conversion, auto approval, commenting options and several limits.
General system messages where customizable so I assume that the system can be setup to use any language.
It also shows general statistics, such as how many videos have in the system separated by private and public and how many videos were played today many plays. It also shows member statistics, such as how many joined today, waiting approval and how many suspended members; group and video comment statistics.
I was lacking the true site statistics about number of visitors and bandwidth usage per day, week, and month.
The member’s panel allows approving, suspending and deleting members.
Administrators are able to manage advertisements in top, bottom, left, right and in home page which all should be entered as HTML code.
The module also manages media approval, media categories and comments.
There was a possibility to send HTML or text newsletters to all site members.
The system shows biggest groups and you are able to set groups as featured and videos as featured with both have also separate management option.
Featured audio was not yet implemented.
Pictures can be set to be approved and the approval process will be done by the site administrator.
Videos and comments can be also flagged.
I found also that there was additional look for the site already available called Zer0One Darkbase which I installed to my service. However this was not working with version 2, so hopefully more web designer will be interested to develop their own themes to newest version.
Site outlook can be customized easily by modifying the CSS files and HTML templates.
Usability
The main page shows most recent and most popular videos.
After the login you will be redirected to the page where selections are: Continue to watch video now, Listen my audio now, Go to my favourites, Complete/Update my profile, Upload/manage my videos now, Upload/manage my audio now, My friends and Privacy notification settings.
Profile features where not customizable by the administration module so user is limited to picture, basic information like gender and birth date, location information and boxes for “More about me”, “Interest and hobbies”, “Favorite movie”, “My type of music”, “More about my high school”, “College/University”, “Work Place” and personal website/blog.
Those information boxes were not customizable using the administrations module, which could have given site owners more customization possibilities to separate target groups.
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Starting to evaluate SocialEngine I was positively surprised how technically open and well programmed it was. It’s expandable with plug-ins and uses Smarty to customize its look and feel.
After the trial download I had Groups, Blog and Photo Album plug-ins included and their website says that Events plug-in is currently available which I was able to look from their website. Social Engine was developed by innovative Californian software company Webligo whose business mission is to brainstorm new innovative ideas to be profitable at early stage and sell those to larger companies who can fully realize their potential. Webligo previous project BlogHoster was sold UK based Splashpress media in 2007 and since 2006 they have worked with SocialEngine (www.socialengine.net). Webligo was founded by Alex Benzer and Charlotte Genevier, who met as Pasadena Polytechnic high school in 2000.
Installation
The installation comes as downloadable compressed file which you should decompress to your server. Files will be extracted starting “files” subdirectory which was little bit odd as I would expect to run my program from the virtual root I created for it.
You will get an email which contains your installation key and attached license.txt file. You should copy this file also to your server application files directory before starting files/admin/install.php otherwise it complains and does not start. That was an odd thing to do but I assume that when purchasing you will get just new license file and not an installation key. The license file was encrypted anyway so I assume they will send me a new license.txt file after a purchase.
After your installation was successful you should delete the install.php and installsql.php for security reasons files otherwise the admin module will start complain each time you log in to that module.
You should setup full rights (777) for uploads directories listed in installation instructions.
URL’s can be specified as normal filenames or subdirectory URL’s. The server requirements are php 4.3 or higher, My Sql 4.1 or higher and when image thumbnail creation feature is necessary the GD 2.0 support. Their professional installation service will cost $30.
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Web Network is social networking software platform developed to communicate between fans, filmmakers and musicians. It is developed by Web Scribble www.webscribble.com
The system contains following areas: Profile, Film, Music, Blog, Groups, Events, Videos and Photos.
It has been developed by Web Scribble Solutions, Inc, a 15 employees company based on US, Upstate New York, Albany. Other products of Web Scribble Solution are: Web Date, Web Jobs, Web Store and Web Classifieds.
It’s written in php 4.12, runs in Linux and Apache servers and needs Zend optimizer 2.62 and MySql database to be installed in the server. Web Scribble promises free installation service when purchasing the license but I assume that the installation could not take more than Uncompressing the files and directories and creating the database.
Usability
Registering and creating the profile is simple but you need to decide, do you want to be a filmmaker, a musician or a just a member. Filmmakers and Musician profiles will appear on separate sections from members.
Personal profile will contain following areas: Basic Info (such as name, gender, birth date and address), About Me, Interest and Lifestyle questions. I didn’t find any customization features for those in Administration module so I assume the need for some Database and programming skills to modify the profile fields.
For profile photo you should upload it to your picture gallery and mark it as profile photo from there which was little bit odd as I had need to classify the description and search tags for it assuming that this photo will be also searchable.
Profiles can be set for Auto Approval or system administrators must approve pending profiles. Others where able to comment your profile which was a feature I wasn’t able to set off in the administration module and I wasn’t able to delete or moderate those comments. Anything once spammed will probably stay there forever.
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