Projects

So I have been working on my Web Professionals Cooperative today and have been working on getting the site up and running.  I will be running it via www.tulsawebpro.com  and have a launch site up integrated with MailChimp to begin a list of interested folks for the site.  I will probably be running a WordPress front end at launch and will be running a social networking script in the back end.  I already have it installed and ready to go.  I just need to start fleshing out the structure of the content.

I was looking for a similar organization and thought about joining Tulsa Young Professionals.  I went to their site and they had some great information on the site and encouraged people to join.  They were running some kind of membership program created by someone in the area so I had hopes for it.  I joined and I was told to join the 8,000+ other young professionals in the area.  I got excited and wanted to see if someone else had created a nice Social Network for the group.  sadly, there wasn’t such a thing and there was no way to interact with the other members online.

I find this to be a disappointing reality for many people.  You join a group with the hopes of collaborating and it turns out that you are stuck in your own island.  I want to be able to give you access to every other member in the group so you can begin collaborating right away.

I was explaining this concept to someone recently and he told me that he was already part of groups like this around town.  I asked him where because I was interested in getting involved with them.  He told me that he was part of groups on LinkedIn to which I just chuckled.  I’m part of all of those same groups and never once have I gone onto LinkedIn and gotten involved with anyone else in the groups.  It’s a joke.  You can’t really have a good collaboration on Facebook because there are too many distractions.  What you need is an environment focused on one subject.

Anyway, I am going to be working on the marketing aspect of this concept next including a new logo and video.

What do you think about having an environment where local developers, writers, and marketers that support the Internet can collaborate and work together?

Background

Stick with me now, I do make a point.  I am not an adopter of new technology.  I’m the anti-gadget geek. Sounds counter intuitive right? I like to let a gadget or software be proven and tested before I jump all in. I didn’t get an MP3 player until the Zune was really popular and only because I realized that I could use it to play a soundtrack while at work.  I used to carry a huge box of CDs with me to work everyday.  The only Streaming music at the time was Yahoo Music and you weren’t in control. I did not get the first iPhone. I got the 3G. Then the 4. Now that I have an iPhone, my Zune collects dust. (It’s been sitting there for about 3 years, I should clean it off.)

Pay for Control

Now I use a service called Rdio to stream music that I want. I still use my iPhone to stream the music from Rdio, but I don’t use iTunes on my iPhone for music.  There are other services out there like MOG and Spotify.  There are other segments other than music, too.  With Books, you can see Nook, Kindle, or Audible for audio books. But music is unique when you consider the feasibility of Private Social Networks in their growth.

• I used to buy entire albums just so I could listen to the one song on it that I liked.  I have a closet full of CD’s right next to the Zune.
• Napster taught us that we could take those albums and rip them to a computer, and share with each other.  Very very bad…
• iTunes figured out that people liked this and licensed single songs to allow people to create their own customized albums.

In all of these cases you couldn’t just take the music where ever you went unless you carried something with you. To do this we went from CD’s to MP3 players,  to streaming online.  This is what happened.

• Yahoo music offered a service free of charge and you could listen to a genre of music. They controlled the playlist and you could only skip through so many songs an hour.  You could listen to this all day long.
• Pandora created a system that dynamically played music based on your interests and exposed you to music you didn’t know you liked.  They also limited the number of times you could skip songs. And they played ads.  Later your could pay to remove the ads.
• Zune took these models of streaming online and allowed you to marry this with the iTunes model.  You could control what you wanted and stream it online as well as to your library.
• These days you just use services like Rdio, MOG, or Spotify to do this and collaborate socially.  I can walk into any office with Internet, login and start playing.

The next step will be that they just imprint the music to our soul.

What’s the point.  The models show that people will find a way to make something more accessible and solves a problem and make it free.  Over time, the life cycle ends and then people are willing to pay to have control.

How does this apply to Private Social Networking.  Social Networks have solved a problem.  How to connect millions of people all over the world.  But then they created a new problem.  Millions of people are connected and you lose control of the information that is going on.  For instance, I quit using Twitter because most of my feed has turned to trash.  I’m losing time because I’m losing control.  Time is money.  Loss of control is loss of money.  I will pay to participate, but also have control.

What I’m trying to say is that the social network market is so over-saturated with trash, that people want to still use the platform and pay to maintain control.  Facebook used to be a party and you had to be a member of the club to get in.  Then they let everyone in and its a huge party.  I want to pay to get into the VIP lounge.

With iGroops we were able to have the site up and running and beta testing within 2 weeks.  It took a little bit of time to learn the quirks and figure out how to get the most out of the system.  iGroops was create by a couple of guys who saw the need for Private Social Networks within their Toastmasters’ community.  The had almost all of the functionality we were looking for including profiles, forum, blogs, video chat system, and the ability to pipe live streaming in more.

This was a learning experience because I finally had something close to what I had been looking for but we learned about the drawbacks too.  The system was hosted online by the service.  We had no access to the backend.  Though the admin was extensive, we could not do simple things like change a client’s username.  We had no ability to clone the site.  If we wanted to create a separate site for each Boot Camp we had to create a new one manually including uploading all of the media, content, and more.

The signup system caused problems because all of the iGroops had a universal login system and we wanted a whitelabel solution.  It was hard to say “Look what we created” when we had to admit that some of the users had to use the same login on another iGroop they were already a member of.

So, after about 3 months it quickly became apparent that we needed to start planning to move out and on our own.  The site was drawing revenue so it was time to start planning our exodus from iGroops.

It must have been May of 2010 when Keith formed the advisory board and we all got together to brainstorm the idea of the future of Mentorship Mastery.  It was getting harder to sell Boot Camps and only see a few people get the help he could offer.  We needed a way to get it out there and more accessible to more people.

We eventually decided that the best way to do this would be to create a Private Social Network.  I began looking to see if there were any new scripts that could handle what we wanted.  Plus, I just got back from a WordPress conference in San Francisco where I learned that Ning was changing their model and that there was going to be a mass exodus from Ning to BuddyPress.  They announced a Ning to BuddyPress script!

I only found three new scripts that I was willing to use and all of them were on the verge of a major release.  But then I found a site called iGroops.  It was basically like Ning on steroids and it had everything we were looking for.  It wasn’t pretty but we did the best we cold and we were able to have it up and ready for Lifetime members within 2 weeks.  We built a buzz with lifetime members before the July 1^st launch and were actually pre-selling memberships before we even had our payment gateway set up.

Xeal, Inc. went out of business and I was approached by many of the former customers to continue working on projects.  I was approached by some of these clients to build my first attempts at Private Social Networks.

Contemporary Lifestyle Publishing:

I first tried to build a private social network for a client from Canada.  The purpose was to help authors complete a publishing process through online collaboration. I tried to use WordPress Multi-User with BuddyPress and bbPress.  This was completely using Open Source software and the final result was a hack that worked but was never used.

This Open Source software was a far cry from being viable and has yet to mature because it isn’t the mission of WordPress to create a social networking system.

Achievement Journal:

I was contacted by this customer to take a second look at the project because I had the biggest hand in creating the previous prototype.  I was asked to try to create a new prototype that was as close to a social network / membership program as possible.  This time I tried to use Open Source Joomla with a paid JomSocial system.  It still didn’t create the complete social network experience.

The prototype is still live and has been pitched but has never gained funding.  I got calls on a weekly basis from my contact on who he was pitching the concept to.  The people he was able to pitch to were big, huge, extremely wealthy people who weren’t really getting the vision.  I’m talking owners of NFL teams huge.  I just went about my business and waited for the call with the go ahead.

Mentorship Mastery:

Keith Kochner called and wanted to have a conversation about revisiting his website.  In 2008, Keith had come to Xeal for a website and I was just bursting with ideas and he and Michelle could tell that I was the guy at Xeal that would get things done.  I was impressed by him too.  I hadn’t met anyone like him before and I made a mental note that this was someone that I would need to take special care of.

I met with Keith and found out that he still had the blog that I created for him and that he had paid an owner at New Medio, who handles Hanson’s social network, to create a membership social experience for his Boot Camp members.  It was hacked together and Keith didn’t like it.

So I came on board to find a solution.  I studied every possible avenue to find the best thing to meet his needs while taking advantage of his content.  I looked into learning management systems like Moodle.  I looked into Open Source Social Networking scripts like Elgg and Pligg.  I looked at Ning.  But I couldn’t find a single source that was all inclusive of all of the components we were looking for.  I went through script after script testing them out and trying to find a way to make it work and I couldn’t.

In early 2008, Xeal, Inc. pitched an idea for an online collaboration / super membership program to a client (Achievement Journal) and began working on a prototype based on eDirectory, an online directory software.  We felt that we could take what we learned on this project and apply it to WWJD.com, one of Xeal’s properties.  Then end result was nothing like what was originally envisioned. The project was abandoned.

With the popularity of MySpace.com it was quickly understood that businesses could benefit from having a social presence on MySpace.  This was further realized with the popularity of Twitter as a social customer service tool and with Facebook opening their exclusivity to corporate networks.

During this year, I became very active in Social Networking and found myself having to login to about 6 different networks to post the same thing.  This was before the days of Open ID.  I pitched the idea that Xeal should create a service that would save your login information for all of your Social Networks, allow you to post one time in an interface, and it update all of your social networks.  The idea was given no merit.

A few months later, a service identical to this was released and became very popular: Ping.fm.  What’s worse, the developers were from Tulsa.

Twitter was gaining popularity and I found it to be a tool to connect with thought leaders in my industry.  I was starting to see how far behind Xeal was in innovating new ideas.  In late 2008, Xeal paid a visit to Blue Fin Financial to discuss a development outsourcing project where I met a former Xeal employee Noah Everett. The deal didn’t happen which was good, because a couple weeks later Noah left Blue Fin to work on a little side project called TwitPic. His service revolutionized the way media gets pictures of history in the making.  He reportedly turned down an offer of 6 figures much higher than $10 million dollars.  I was inspired needless to say.

In September 2008, Yammer took the Twitter model and created a private Twitter system for businesses.  I instantly knew that there would be a space for Private Social Networks. In September 2010, they launched version 2.0, an Enterprise Social Network system.  (I guess I was right.)