Axero Pulse » Social Media

Member Profiles In Social Networking

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:00:44 +0000

Putting A Face To Social Networking For Business

It’s amazing how many people we work with everyday and do business with are people we have never physically seen or met with in person. With every passing year, this number seems to increase with more people opting to work from home, customers who you’ve connected with through email or phone calls, offshore colleagues and contacts you’ve made through social networks. In larger organizations it’s not uncommon to have co-workers who you’ve never met and you know them as another name on the intranet. Personal contact in business is slowly becoming a scarce interaction as we communicate and collaborate increasingly online. It’s still good to have a face you can put to a person you are working with and that face in today’s context is the user or member profile.

The profile is your online identity and though some may feel it’s not as relevant in the business environment as it may be on MySpace or Facebook, I would differ. With the spread of business interaction on social networks, many valuable connections happen online and the profile is very much what forms the first impressions. Whether you’re on Twitter, Linkedin, someone’s blog or your company’s social software based Intranet, you instinctively look up a person’s profile to learn more about them and decision on whether to connect with them and start a conversation is often influenced by what you take from their profile. While the nature of social software is based on human interaction, the lack of being able to put a face and personality to the person you are working with can play some role in building a level of comfort and trust. Once you’ve seen a photo you can associate with and learned a bit about them through their profile information, it puts you at ease and helps you identify with the person despite not having met.

This may seem a very small point in the scheme of things but it’s very important to working online because it’s what we do naturally offline. When you first connect with someone in your working life you first try to size them up, know something about them which will allow you identify who they are, what are their likes, what are their dislikes and you’ll tread cautiously till you have some idea. We look for the same when we work online. Even before speaking to someone for the first time, you would like to have a brief profile which would help you understand a bit about them and that’s why they are still an important part of social software based website even if it is for business.

So while some traditional corporate Intranets may still avoid a member profile feature in their software, in the world of “social” business we like having a human touch to our interactions and like having a personality we can associate with the people we work with. Don’t you?

ASP.NET Community Software: Exception Handling Framework in Communifire

Tim Eisenhauer — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:28:06 +0000

ASP.NET Community Software Communifires’, Flexible plug-n-play Exception Handling Framework

In today’s fast paced software development models, even the most stable applications will experience an occasional situation in which an error pops up. Even after extensive testing and quality assurance, it’s possible to still experience errors from time to time. Sometimes errors will occur due to invalid user input, misuse of a certain feature, or sometimes there may just be a bug in the code. We’ve all come to live with the possibility of an error within an application. Until a breakthrough is made in artificial intelligence, software applications continue to require that the users interact with them in a fairly well defined manner.

What’s important, is how an application responds, handles, and recovers from the error.

When an error does occur, the software application must clearly communicate to the user:

why the data is not valid
make it easy for the user to recover from the error, and
allow the technical team behind the error to easily fix the problem

Communifire, our ASP.NET social networking platform, is no exception. With such a large code base containing hundreds of thousands of lines of code, there is still a possibility for an error to occur here and there. And when an error does occur, we stand behind our product and promptly fix the bug in the code. With this in mind, and to combat the “blue or yellow screen of death,” we have built in a comprehensive exception handling and logging framework. Every section of code within Communifire, from the database layer, to business later, to the UI layer, contains error handling.

All exceptions are handled and logged within in code, along with all the necessary technical information to pinpoint, analyze, and fix the error. The system is smart — after making sure that the exception has been logged, the layer in the code where the error happened will re-throw a user friendly exception message to the user interface, informing the user of the error. This friendly exception message is necessary because the end users do not want to see the technical details of the exception. All errors are logged into a database and accessible from within the administration section of the social networking platform, allowing our technical team to download the error details, analyze them, and promptly fix them.

A few salient points to ensure your satisfaction when dealing with errors:

Communifire logs all exceptions and re-throws “user friendly” messages.
The complete stack trace is recorded to insure that programmers can have access to all the details related to the exception that was thrown.
The exception and logging system is based on the “Factory Design pattern” to easily allow developers to extend the framework and add custom logging classes. This also allows you to log exceptions to the database, in the event log, to a custom text or XML file or all of the above.
All user-friendly exception messages are stored in an XML resource file. You can easily alter the friendly error messages without the need to re-compile the code.
Errors are usually simple to fix, due to the organized and well documented source code.

You have just read an overview of the features of the error handling and exception logging functionality in the Communifire Social Networking Platform. If you’re interested in checking out a live social network running on Communifire, you can check out CodeAsp.Net – an ASP.NET Community.

And to learn more about Communifire, click here to read about the Social Networking Platform in ASP.NET.

Free Social Media Marketing & SEO Ebooks, White Papers + Other Downloads

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:21:10 +0000

I came across a post on seoptimise.com that contains links to about 25 free social media marketing and SEO books, white papers, and many other downloads.

These downloads stem from highly respectable sources and are free as agencies and specialists tend to promote themselves showing off their expertise for free to gain recognition as experts. So this is a win to win situation for the sides, you the reader as well as the authors.

– Lots of great information here.

Click to read more