A flood of enquiries from social network owners keen to migrate to the new SocialGO.com platform but concerned that it will copy new policies introduced by its rival Ning has generated a firm denial from owners Bright Things. Ning recently changed its strategy to harvest all the members of thousands of privately created social networks to encourage them to join a new Ning generalized social network. This has caused a furore among many Ning Network Creators.

Dominic Wheatley commented: ‘SocialGO – unlike Ning – segregates the content of each network giving total protection and control to each Network Creator. While we have many thousands of networks using SocialGo we are not a ‘big network’ with many smaller ones within it, so network data and membership belong solely to the creator. They are not connected in any way with other networks or SocialGo as a whole. This means there is no centralised ‘ID’ or login required to initially become a part of SocialGO, as there is with other networks. Also your network relationship will not be shared across other networks.

‘Unlike Ning, if users decide to leave SocialGO they can request backup of their full network data or perform this themselves using our open API. All of the users’ members and content goes with them.

‘What makes us different from other social networks is our concentration on satisfying individual network creators. We want to provide the best turnkey combination of network creation tools. Ning has done a good job marketing the idea of creating social networks, but many users are now ready to take their networks and new ideas for networks to the next level where they own the data, members and content they work so hard build.

‘I guarantee that SocialGO will never aggregate users’ content or membership in any way unless they specifically request or authorise it; if for example they should wish their site to be included in a global directory. At all times users will have access to their site and the right to migrate or backup the same without interference.

‘The SocialGO platform has been created with total customer satisfaction as its only goal. We can do this because we have a logical business model in place and do not rely on advertising as the major source of revenue. This is what makes us different from many other platforms.’