Today we are excited to bring you SocialEngine Cloud, our next-generation community platform. We’ve been building and talking about this for over six months, so we can’t wait to finally get it in your hands.
We built SocialEngine Cloud because we see a major opportunity ahead. Needless to say, Facebook has been incredibly effective at bringing your “social graph”, or the network of people you know, online. That said, we believe that Facebook really hasn’t nailed the the “interest graph” – the network of people around the world that share your interests. The explosive growth of social bookmarking, microsharing and curatorial services like Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, and Pose prove this. These networks show that there is a growing demand for content discovery around interests – content shared by people we don’t necessarily know offline. There has never been a better time to start your own unique social network.
We already see a proliferation of these interest-centric networks taking place, but it’s not happening nearly as fluidly as it could. There’s still a lot of time, energy and technical expertise needed to launch a modern interest-based social network. Most white-label, turnkey services out there (like Ning, for example) often fail to deliver because they are either more appropriate for small social-graph groups, or because they serve up a much more “traditional” social experience. SocialEngine Cloud is the first community platform to incorporate the content sharing features, social mechanics, and third-party services that are making other interest-based social networks so immersive and engaging.
Here’s what we have coming next. We’ll be focusing on our launch this and next week, onloading hundreds of new SE Cloud site owners. Our top post-launch priorities are to create a migration path from SE PHP for those that want to switch, and to create a theming kit and companion docs so you can customize (and share) SE Cloud themes more easily. We’ll then move on to implementing better language tools as well as our two-way API, which will help third-party developers build their own unique addons for the platform.
If you haven’t tried SE Cloud yet, you can check out our live demos, or you can give it a go for 14 days free. You’re entitled to our support service as long as you’re subscribing to SE Cloud, and that support covers SE PHP questions too, so that might be a good resource for those of you that want ongoing support coverage for SE PHP as well.
SE Cloud is a young platform. It’s still quite simple and minimal, but our team has 10 years of shared experience with building social applications, and we are cranking hard on adding features based on your direct feedback. Send us your ideas and help us make it more awesome.
