Many of our network owners rely on advertising revenue to fund the
maintenance and fees associated with their networks. We at Zocku
and SocialGO have from the beginning been mindful of this and have
given unrivaled access to place free form custom HTML on any tab,
page header or footer on your networks. Unlike Ning and other
networks, we have kept these facilities open and alive and continue
to do so for our premium networks.
This has been great for our network owners and has allowed them to
create CSS masterpieces, cool widgets or even integrate their
own systems more deeply with their networks. It also has allowed
some really innovative advertising systems such as the peel-back
page ads and live chat widgets that are helping webmasters create
fun, relevent and profitable advertising systems that their
member's like. With the introduction of the layout manager, there
will be even more freedom as we break up your SocialGO and Zocku
networks into mini-blocks which can be manipulated, dragged and
dropped and generally mashed up.
This will give you more flexibility and control than any hosted
social network system in the world and is something which we are
extremely proud to be offering you.
Prototype Layout Manager
There is of course a downside to all this. It does make it
very easy to ruin your user's experiance, make page speeds
intollerable and ultimately piss a lot of your members off and
here's why:
When a page gets delivered by our servers to the user, there is a
secondary set of requests that have to be made by the user's
browser. Some of these stop the page loading until they are
complete. Some ad systems load in massive pages at the base of
SocialGO pages or very heavy flash adverts, including some which
have over 2mb of content on every page load. That is 4 or 5 x the
average page weight of a SocialGO page. If those third party
servers are slow or timing out then the whole network will grind to
a halt.
Just to be clear, we are not talking about ad systems which output
normal 728x80 ads or even some of the more creative ones and whilst
you build reliance on third party Javascript systems there is a
risk. There is nothing special, or different about the way we
include these things so the problems that these scripts cause on
SocialGO would happen anywhere else on the web.
To avoid it being a problem, use the least obtrusive javscript you
can find, those which simply include an iframe or images are best
as they can be fetched and rendered after the page has loaded.
Also, keep an eye on it using tools such YSlow for Yahoo Firebug
which will tell you how fast each element of the page is loading so
you can spot the offender.
The point here is not to limit freedom or the ability to monetize
your networks but rather to maintain quality of experience for your
users whilst allowing all your advertising to remain. We want to
keep opening up the platform with the layout manager above, the api
etc and more great tools but we need to help people from turning
their networks into the Las Vegas Strip.
