Ashish’s World!

Most of the projects that we do in Tekriti are special to me, as one of the selection criteria is their coolness and utility value. This criteria is one which is very important as it allows us to be very upbeat and excited about the stuff we do. But I will single out 2 projects currently for a special mention - GoingOn and PeopleAggregator. These are 2 products which are very special to my company. In this post, I am going to talk about GoingOn and the next post will be dedicated to PeopleAggregator - I will talk about the other projects with time and as we make further progress.

As the text on the site says: “GoingOn is a growing network of corporate, media, nonprofit, and individual brand networks that share on a common weblog publishing and community management platform”

Few of the points, in no particular order, which makes the system special are:

• First complete meta-network: GoingOn is the first system which lets you create social networks on the fly. You can choose the name of the network, specify a URL, upload the logo and banner images, specify the network categories and tags, choose the layout in terms of number of columns, choose the color themes, etc. It also maintains a network directory, which is used to discover more networks of a particular interest. We provide a single sign-on to all the networks, where ‘Joining a Network’ is pretty straight-forward.
• Hosted social network, with a subscription model for paid networks: The business model for the platform revolves around hosting the social network for you. So, whether it’s a basic (free) network or one of the paid networks, GoingOn hosts the network for you - so that you don’t have to worry about maintaining it. If it’s a paid network, you just have to pay a monthly fee which depends upon the type of network you are creating.
• Micro-content creation using Structured Blogging as the default publishing platform: The content publishing platform not only lets you create blogs but other micro-content like Reviews, Events, Audio, Video, People Showcase utilizing Structured Blogging - implicitly supporting the micro-formats. This will be the first social network again which uses Structured Blogging as the default publishing platform.
• Network Customization: Not only can you choose from various layouts and the color themes, you can also customize the homepage of your network by placing various modules / blocks in the left, right and center of the homepage. Apart from this, you can also dynamically customize a top-level tab of the network and put relevant content in it. So - a ecommerce site will want to put a ‘Products’ tab there but a Blog may have ‘About’ tab - it all depends upon the network administrator.
• Member Page Customization: As a user, you have an option to customize ‘your page’. You have a set of modules to choose from (and the list will only keep growing with time) like ‘My Tags’, ‘My Flickr’, ‘My Media Gallery’, ‘My Connections’, ‘My Networks’ which can be enabled / disabled and moved around on the page.
• People Subscription: The RSS feed for a person will not only have their blogs but will have their other micro-content and media gallery, essentially making it a compound feed.
• Access Control: All profile fields have access control - so you can make individual fields visible to everybody, by categories of connections (friends, online connection, lead,clients, family, etc.) , to only 1st degree friend, to only 2nd degree friends, etc.
• Web Services Integration: Apart from the commonly used web-services like Flickr, delicious in social networks, GoingOn provides you services provided by other Web 2.0 companies from within the system. So - if you can power feed management through Newsgator, you can also export your contacts to Salesforce and get the online reputation management done by Opinity. The list will only grow and I will provide my experiences with each as and when we do the integration.
• Advanced Editorial publishing system: The platform also gives a network administrator functionality to invite authors, editors who can create editorial posts. These posts appear separate from the Member Posts (Blogs, etc.) and gives the administrator appropriate permissions to place the 2 content appropriately on the homepage. It also gives network administrators advanced back-of-the-house tools for content and member management.
• Personal Blog and External Blogs: Every GoingOn member gets a GoingOn blog and flexibility to add multiple external blogs. The GoingOn system will not only display the posts from External blogs but also lets you route your posts from your GoingOn blog to your external blogs.

If you want to know more about the platform, take a tour here and then create an account yourself and play with the system.

Look forward to our Beta release next month - I will have a lot more to write when we make the announcement.

Disclaimer: All the features I have mentioned above are not still built in the system but we will keep adding them with time.