We were excited to have Comparz.com interview SocialEngine recently. Comparz provides in-depth user reviews and rankings of services for small and mid-sized businesses, from email marketing and lead management services to web conferencing and online data backup services, and will quickly add more categories as they grow. You can read the full interview by clicking here.

What's up SE Fans?

Are you a visual person? Well we just wanted to let you know that our good friends from SocialEngineMarket.com has just created a wonderful video resource site dedicated to "visually" showing you how to customize/utilize SocialEngine. The webite is called SocialEngine.Tv - make sure you check them out.

We are a software vendor and copyright owner, and we hate SOPA.

SocialEngine is different than most online community-building tools. While our platform is commercially-licensed and not open source, we do give our customers total access to our source code. We don’t compile or encrypt anything because we want our customers to have complete creative freedom when they customize their community websites.

The downside of making our source code accessible is, you guessed it... piracy. SocialEngine is widely pirated and not terribly hard to find in the Internet’s murkier recesses. Ostensibly, the SOPA/PIPA legislation is designed to protect intellectual property owners like us from this kind of activity. The obvious truth, though, is that SOPA/PIPA would absolutely ruin our business because it would drastically inhibit SocialEngine customers’ ability to create their own online communities in the first place.

Gigaom published a great article about the rise of social content curation on social networks and interest-based communities. At SocialEngine, we’ve seen tons of evidence supporting this. Much of the content that end-users share on the thousands of community websites powered by SocialEngine is being re-shared from other sources, or links to copyrighted content that’s hosted elsewhere. SOPA/PIPA puts niche online communities in as much jeopardy as it does the mainstream networks like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Communities powered by SocialEngine only make up a fraction of that long tail. There are millions of online communities and hundreds of millions of end-users that enjoy them every day.

We are calling on our community of SocialEngine customers, developers, service providers, and hosting affiliates to speak up in solidarity against SOPA/PIPA. Here are some ways you can take action right now:

• Outside the US? Find out what's wrong with ACTA and do something about it. Email the US state department about PIPA and SOPA via Stop American Censorship
• Look up and contact your representative via the EFF
• Complete the Take Action Checklist at Stop American Censorship

Thank you all for a great 2011! We've released some awesome features with 4.2, as well as the usual flurry of bug fixes and tweaks. These are core features, so they are free for all of you!

4.2 is now available to download in the client area, and we will be releasing the 4.2 trial within a week. As always, please be sure to backup your database before upgrading or making any changes!

List of features:

• reCAPTCHA - Free service that will help prevent spam bots from registering on your SocialEngine site.
• Clean Theme - Alex designed a new theme focused on simplicity. Try it for yourself. We know you'll love it!
• Janrain - Use this social login service to let your users conveniently register and login with their Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIN, Yahoo!, and other social networking services.
• Wibiya - an online toolbar platform that offers SocialEngine publishers the option to add web applications to their respective websites. Increase communication within your community!

Take a peek at our CHANGELOG for the complete list of updates.

Please contact us if you have any questions!

Hello SE Fans,

Want to stop bots from registering to your SocialEngine site? reCAPTCHA is the solution! reCAPTCHA is a completely FREE SERVICE that makes it harder for spam bots to register on your site. Below is a screenshot of it in action.

You might have already seen this feature in action in many of the popular websites you visit like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. It's a pretty effective anti-spam tool and we are going to incorporate it into the next version release of SocialEngine. You can learn more about reCAPTCHA by visiting this page: http://www.google.com/recaptcha

The next version will be releasing this month - make sure to watch out for it!