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SkaDate – online dating and social networking software combined

May 16, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko Herne Name: Veiko Herne
Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com
Site: http://veikoh.wordpress.com
About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10) Social Networks

SkaDate is a social networking and online dating software platform supporting videos and photo albums. It can be seen here: www.skadate.com

Ska Date has been developed by Skalfa eCommerce, employing 18 dedicated programmers and support staff. They recently opened their representative EU office in Czech Republic instead usual UK. Besides dating software their other product line is Chuppo rich media applications, which are actually part of SkaDate.

Sites features are customizable from administration module, like Press, Search, Photo, Multimedia, Profile view, Events, Messages, Virtual Kiss, Friends Only Photos, Flash chat, Instant messenger, Photo rate, Profile Rate, Friends Networking, Polls, Ads, Tags, Bookmark, Blocklist, Chuppo Recorder, Forum, Blogs, Password Protected Photos, Profile comments and HTML usage in profiles.

They also offer a hosted version of this software. Check it out here

From administration module was possible to assign cost for each event or leave it as free service. The software supports unlimited membership levels allowing setup events for each level and limiting even the event usage per day or month.

SkaDate supports several payment gateways like PayPal, ccBILL, SecurePay, Authorise.net, SecPay, etc.

The navigation menu was customizable to each member level group so members will see only functions allocated to the membership level.

The administration module allows customization of multimedia and photo parameters, limiting the number of invitations, creating virtual kiss templates, enabling the friends’ network and customizing the profile fields which can be even dependent to each other.

Customizable watermark can be added to photos and videos to protect copyrights.

The product becomes with 18 layout templates and the customer can get additional templates free of charge from their website when those will become available free of charge. I assume that knowing little bit CSS the programmer can write their own templates for the site.

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Tags: online dating, photo, php, skadate, social network, software, video

AbleSpace and AbleDating – combining social networking and video with dating in one package

Apr 29, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko Herne Name: Veiko Herne
Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com
Site: http://veikoh.wordpress.com
About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10) Social Networks

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.

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Tags: 3Dcity, abledate, ablespace, community, dating software, review, social network, software

osTube – a new social networking media platform

Apr 21, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko Herne Name: Veiko Herne
Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com
Site: http://veikoh.wordpress.com
About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10) Social Networks, Video sharing

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.

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Tags: community, documents, media, ostube, pictures, platform, social network, video sharing

PHPMotion – free open source social networking media platform

Apr 11, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko Herne Name: Veiko Herne
Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com
Site: http://veikoh.wordpress.com
About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10) Social Networks, Video sharing

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.

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Tags: audio, free, media platform, open-source, php, phpmotion, social network, video

SocialEngine – a PHP based social network platform

Mar 6, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko Herne Name: Veiko Herne
Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com
Site: http://veikoh.wordpress.com
About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10) Social Networks

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.

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Tags: community, php social network, social engine, viral, web 2.0, webligo, white label software

WebNetwork – a white label social networking software

Feb 17, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko Herne Name: Veiko Herne
Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com
Site: http://veikoh.wordpress.com
About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10) Social Networks

WebNetwork is a 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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Tags: social network, software, web 2.0, web software review, webnetwork, webscribble, white label software