- Finance: understand balance sheets? able to execute our well planned
financial projections? willing to communicate with and manage our US and
Turkish accountants? experienced in accounting for more than 2 years? have
background in finance from one of Turkey's top universities? Join us. This is
the place for you to blossom. You may be our future CFO.
- Marketing: understand Google AdSense, AdWords? familiar with landing pages,
A/B tests? keen on experimenting with affiliate marketing plans, coupons, price
discrimination strategies? interested in sales? love social media? GROU.PS is
all about people's passions, affiliations and interests. Join us to execute and
contribute to our well defined growth plans. (http://grou.ps/groudotps/wiki/item/head-of-international-content)
- Customer Support: build a team of interns to help us assist our group founders with live chat and rich documentation. Fluency in English, understanding of social media and good communication/leadership skills are a must. (http://grou.ps/groudotps/wiki/item/director-of-customer-support)
Key attributes we are looking for
- Product marketing / management experience
- Internet / social media domain knowledge or experience
- Excellent communications skills; ability to message and position a product effectively
The position is based out of our Istanbul office and will be a key leadership role in the company. Competitive salary and company benefits.
To apply for this job: http://www.yonjamedia.com/job.jsp?id=52001
BuddyPress
BuddyPress is a fairly new project but it was created by the same good folks who created the most popular blogging platform, Wordpress. It is a software solution, so unlike hosted/cloud solutions, it requires you to have your own servers and run it from there, continually update and be careful about the conflicts that might occur with your patches and plugins. Which means it's for advanced users and it costs you money. If you are strictly looking for a hosted solution though, I'd recommend that you go with them. The other players are Elgg (which has also recently launched its own hosted solution) and Pligg (which I heard just a few days ago). I know some of the folks behind BuddyPress (at Automattic); they are very nice people and they have funding that makes the software a safe bet for the long-term viability of your community. They are much more experienced in online publishing than any of us, too, but the software is not as mature as that of more established players like Elgg and Pligg. At GROU.PS, we are strong believers in the cloud (i.e. hosted solutions). Running stuff on your own servers costs not only money but time and effort. There's a longer learning curve as well. I'm an open-source addict, and I love how customizable BuddyPress and similar players can be because of their open-source nature. Actually, that's why GROU.PS started its own open-source initiative two years ago. But at the end of the day, we evaluated our resources and decided to stick with one thing—but do it so perfectly that we would deliver the best of both worlds. At GROU.PS, we have the vision to create an eco-system similar to -- or even broader than -- SalesForce's AppForce platform. Our Developer and Template Design platforms are early examples of that. Expect to see tighter integration and more opportunities to make money from your knowledge on the GROU.PS platform soon. Such an extensible cloud-based solution not only is much more practical but would solve many of the incompatibility and crash hassles that occur in the open-source world.
Spruz
[update: Spruz has brought new limits to its service, only 100 members allowed in the free package]
Spruz has done some pretty impressive stuff. It managed to sneak into the Ning network with a toolbar add-on called skysa, and then created its own alternative platform, which today is called Spruz (and looks like a quick and dirty hack), using the knowledge and expertise it gained from skysa to steal networks from Ning. This strategy gave it a huge boost over others in the importing process. Independent stats confirm that, too: Alexa shows stunning growth, and Compete and Quantcast indicate that GROU.PS and Spruz are the fastest-growing networks since Ning’s big announcement. This growth of Spruz is fascinating, considering that GROU.PS had already been Ning’s biggest competitor for a long while; showing the same growth as us as a new player is indeed a good job. Spruz remains the fourth player, though, right behind SocialGo.
I really dislike a few things about Spruz, though, and I should state them here:
1) The look and feel are pretty poor, although the templates are fairly customizable. I know that style is a subjective matter, but try it for yourself. Look and feel are critical to creating a sense of belonging within your online community. They are what makes your members feel at home. Otherwise, why not use Facebook Groups to start your own social network?
2) Spruz is new but is already starting to have
technical issues. Scaling to thousands of social networks is not an easy job.
We remember that from our early days in 2008. Scaling requires a lot of
experience and investment.
3) A personal concern of mine is that some of its templates are exact copies
from our library. Granted, some of those templates are open source, and
imitation is OK to some extent—but copying our default template is not the
friendliest thing you can do.
4) One thing that I recommend all community managers look at is the financial
stability of the platform they choose. Hosting millions of networks is an
expensive job. Spruz is secretive about its funding and corporate status.
Choosing a platform is like choosing a business partner: you need some
transparency.
5) In a blog post, Spruz declared that it would cut costs by removing unused communities and by not serving videos. Not serving videos or files and saving on bandwidth is understandable; bandwidth is expensive. But losing that functionality is serious. And removing unused communities is kind of a silly argument because that does not really cut many costs.
Apart from these points, I find Spruz' community
management very successful. It seems very responsive to people who want to
build their communities there.
SocialGo
I first heard about SocialGo, I guess, in mid 2008. Their platform is noticeably different for those who are familiar Ning. You may consider this originality and hence a plus.They are surely spending the most money in between these companies for advertising. I even see their ads on GROU.PS. They invest a lot of money in Google Ads. They should be financially more secure compared to some of the other hosted DIY social network companies that I mention here; their investors include the founders of Eidos, a big video game success.
Webs
Webs is a very old and pretty stable web site creation service. I know one of their founders and investors, they are pretty committed to what they do and they are right now one of the best web site creation services out there. However, DIY social networking is not their core; it's an after-thought. Their DIY social networking platform is built on top of their existing web site creation platform as a patch - and that shows in the product itself with very weak social graph features, no real benefits of friending/following etc. That's why DIY social networking sounds like a me-too thing that they've done to justify their valuation in the heydays of the social networking.
Grouply
Grouply has a special place for me. 3 years ago, when Grouply was about to launch, GROU.PS was already up and running, I was introduced to them by my advisor who told me that we might be doing something similar - probably concluding from our names. Anyways, I emailed back and forth with their founders, I always enjoy meeting the managers/founders of the competitive companies, compare notes and see what we can do together to create a healthy competition environment. At that time, GROU.PS was totally a 1 man show with a single advisor, I had no funding, I was just a 23 years old guy who left his homeland with the dream of creating the world's best online community in Silicon Valley - where the software dreams come true.
GROU.PS
According to all independent sources GROU.PS is today the largest competitor of Ning. And again, early results show that GROU.PS and Spruz have become the biggest winners of Ning's decision to kick off free networks (even though GROU.PS has no leverage such as skysa) But I think there's much to see in this area; so everything can change. What I can observe people create their networks to try the platforms but many haven't come to a final conclusion yet. And I think that makes sense. Platform choice is a very important decision and needs to be made carefully.
GROU.PS is a content agnostic platform that aims to monetize this space by an asymmetric business model. That means, unlike Ning, we won't sell software, that's not our plan, we will instead charge brands and advertisers. Asymmetric model works pretty well in Google, Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand, services like eBay, Amazon, Salesforce use a symmetric model (a la Ning) where they charge directly those who use their service.
Final Notes
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We care about our communities. After observing a lot of education communities moving to our platform; we've decided to create 2 new templates for the education community. Here are the screenshots:

Dear Jessica,
To quote our old friend William Shakespeare:
"See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!"
From the first day I saw you in French 101, I only wanted to be that metaphorical glove. Though my first instinct was to tell you "je te adore," I now long to say, "Je veux etre avec toi!!!" I know we haven't talk much thse past three years, but I know you are
*~*~* The One *~*~*
Based on this conclusion, I am making a proposition to which I am hoping you will consent. In order to satrt our courtship, it is first necessary to meet in person and complete the procedure of a proper date. This could include any of the following proposed activities (though not necessarily in the current order). I have highlighted my preferred choice:
DATE ACTIVITIESPlease let me know in a prompt fashion whether you will partake in this date with me. An idea of your schedule in the next week would be helpful in planning this event. Please try to avoid Wednesday and Friday nights, as that is when my dorm has game nights, although you are free to stop by to join in the festivities if you would like. Sorry, that came out wrong--actually, I would love it if you came to those too, that is, if you want. Would you mind responding by tomorrow?
- A film at the local theater
- A beverage of some sort
- A brief stroll through downtown
- A visit to the mini gold establishment down the street
- Playing any of an assortment of MMORPGs
- A tour of the Computer History Museum
Dreaming of you,
Michael
Things to bing (or google if you want to):
nginx, libevent, memcache, danga interactive, gearman, mogilefs, nosql, cassandra, hive, hadoop, scribe, thrift, maatkit (for mysql), mmm (for mysql)
MySQL useful settings:
query_cache_size = 0 # on master
query_cache_type = 0 # on master
thread_concurrency = 8 # total cores
max_connections = 750 # shouldn’t exceed that
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 10G # a little less than the total amount
And our typical sysctl additions; as I've promised - the configuration that lets us serve 1PB per month to 3 million unique visitors:


