HuzuSocial Features

HuzuSocial has a broad array of social media features that provide everything for organisations and companies to exploit the popularity of social networking.

Social Features

• Friending - The keystone of any social application is the ability for users to connect with each other. HuzuSocial makes it effortless for users to make friends, and allows users to friend each other.
• Userwall - Allow your users to post status updates, comments and ‘LIKE’ updates from other users.  Additionally our API allows you to write game events such as high scores.
• Share Pictures and Video - HuzuSocial makes it easy for users to upload pictures and video. A user’s friends can then comment and ‘LIKE’ the content they upload.

Customisable Profiles

With HuzuSocial you can create custom forms to capture data unique to your application. For example, get info about your users’ location or hobbies, then use that data in your game, application or marketing materials.

Micropayments

An important element of any game or virtual world is the ability to easily collect micropayments and subscriptions from your users. HuzuSocial ships with SagePay integration and other payment providers can be supported by making use of our SDK.

• Subscriptions - HuzuSocial supports a subscription model, where payments can be scheduled to be collected from users on a fixed schedule defined by you.
• Direct Payments/Virtual Currency - HuzuSocial supports direct payments, where users can buy set amounts of virtual currency to spend in your game or application.

Membership

HuzuSocial ships with a powerful role-based membership system you can use to authenticate your users and verify their email addresses. You can also configure a minimum age to access your site as well as password length, captchas and many more safety features.

Campaign Management

HuzuSocial allows you to create and compile reports on marketing campaigns you are running on the site to encourage users to sign-up.

• Invite Codes  - If your site or application is in beta you can run a campaign to encourage users to try your site using a unique invite code.  You can then track how successful your campaign has been in encouraging users to sign-up.
• Coupon Codes - You can run promotions, such as give away gifts and free virtual currency, using a unique coupon code. HuzuSocial can process the coupon code, and reward your users appropriately. Reports are available to track the success of the campaign.

Ad Management

HuzuSocial integrates with the Open X ad serving platform allowing you a simple way to monetize your application. If you would prefer another ad provider our API can be used to integrate with any provider of your choice.

Content Management System

When managing a web application it can be difficult to refresh content quickly and easily.  HuzuSocial ships with a custom CMS allowing you to select templates, create pages and child pages. This ensures you can quickly refresh content without having to perform a full deployment.

• CMS Widgets - The CMS ships with a number of built-in widgets such as Twitter streams, Facebook Comments and Video. Additionally you can create your own custom widgets using the C# SDK.

Media Management

HuzuSocial allows you to quickly and easily upload:

• Images
• Video
• Documents and Flash files

The Media Management component integrates with the CMS, so all your media can be easily displayed on your site.

Email Management

Any large app will generate a large number of emails, authorisation requests, friend invites, support requests etc.  All your emails can be managed from within HuzuSocial. You can customize the text of emails sent to your users, and use tokens to address them personally.

Moderation

The HuzuSocial team realises that a poorly moderated site can quickly become a ghetto. To that end we have a number of moderation tools that allow you to manage user-generated content and if necessary block or ban users from logging into your site.

• Parental Control - HuzuSocial ships with a sophisticated parental control system, enabling you to force children to require parental approval to access your application.
• Parent Panel - Parents can manage their children’s access through our Parent Panel. If necessary they can also temporarily block their child from accessing the site and delete the account.
• User Management - The HuzuSocial team has spent a lot of time on working on user management features, so you can block users, export details to excel for integration with marketing tools like Mailchimp and capture login and transaction histories.
• Profanity Checking - HuzuSocial ships with built-in profanity-checking using a dictionary of thousands of inappropriate words. So if your site is targeted at children, our system will prevent profanities from being posted.
• Manage User Feedback - HuzuSocial integrates with Zendesk making it simple for you to manage all user feedback and support requests.
• User Audit Trail - HuzuSocial stores an audit trail of actions carried out by users, so any grievances by users can be investigated in full.

HuzuVirtual Integration

HuzuSocial seamlessly integrates with HuzuVirtual, making it easy to host your game and social network with us.

Debug Info

The HuzuSocial team has worked hard to make it easy to acquire detailed debug information on your application.

• Logging Info - We use log4net to output debug information straight into the admin panel, so you can quickly see where any exceptions may be occurring.  Additionally we use elmah to give you full information on web errors, such as 404 pages.
• Azure Diagnostics - We also log the performance of your Azure servers, so you know in plenty of time if you need to scale up your application at peak times.

Cloud-Based Platform

HuzuSocial makes use of the latest cloud-based technologies to minimise maintenance and maximise availability.

We deploy and manage our server applications on the world’s leading cloud hosting providers including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure platform. This allows us to offer high performance managed hosting solutions that are flexible enough to grow with your audience size at a cost effective price.

High Scale

HuzuSocial has been designed to be deployed on the Windows Azure platform, ensuring that no matter how popular your application or site is HuzuSocial can automatically scale up to meet demand.

High Availability

By running on the cloud we can guarantee 99.9% uptime, so no restless nights worrying about your servers.

Integrated with the best cloud services

The HuzuSocial team have carefully selected and tested the best cloud services and integrated them into our platform. As standard you have access to the following services:

• Micropayments via SagePay - HuzuSocial has worked closely with SagePay to ensure that payments for your game are processed quickly and successfully. Get reports on successful transactions, cancellations and failed transactions. If you would prefer to use another Payment Provider, you can hook it in yourself using our SDK.
• Manage user feedback via Zendesk - HuzuSocial integrates with Zendesk in a number of places so you can easily manage and action feedback from your users. For example, create a custom error page with a feedback form, and HuzuSocial takes care of passing the form data through to Zendesk.
• Email delivery via SendGrid - Get daily metrics on the number of emails that your application is generating, any bounces and the number of emails that have been opened.

HuzuSocial SDK

HuzuSocial includes a sophisticated SDK that allows low-level access to many advanced features.

If you want to become more directly involved with the platform you can use the HuzuSocial SDK, which is proved as a dotNET solution. This includes DLLs and documentation; everything you need to be able to extend the platform for your own business needs.

Multi-Tenant Architecture

The framework has been written to allow you to host a number of different tenants (or customers) in the same solution. This has a number advantages:

• It is trivial to share code between all your customers without having to copy DLLs or code into different
• Avoids customer specific branches.
• Allows you to update all your customers to a new version of your software simultaneously. Or, if you prefer, you can update your customers one by one.

Inversion of Control

HuzuSocial makes use of the popular Castle-Windsor IOC container.  This means you can completely override the base implementation of a particular component with your own custom implementation. It is then very easy to extend the platform to meet your customers’ specific requirements.

C# Service Layer API

To work with our platform you make calls into our Service Layer. This is broken down into logically grouped modules, such as Membership, Media Management, Friends and so on.  Full documentation is provided on purchase.

RESTful API

The HuzuSocial RESTful API gives you the ability to leverage our platform using our APIs. All the features mentioned are available for you to use.  Create and authenticate users, display a users wall, get friends list and so on.  Everything has been designed to be easily integrated into your application.

The Stack

HuzuSocial is built using the latest components of the Microsoft .Net stack.

• Server-side code is written entirely in C# 4.
• The web application and admin panel are built on ASP.Net MVC 3.
• ORM is handled with Entity Framework 4.

Leveraging Open Source technologies

HuzuSocial utilises a number of open-source technologies:

• Castle-Windsor 2.5
• NUnit 2.5
• Elmah 1.2
• Log4Net
• Quartz.Net
• MigratorDotNet
• NAnt

Deployment Options

HuzuSocial can be deployed on either:

• Windows Azure
• Windows Server 2008 and above

Storage

Depending on your deployment choice, storage and data persistence are provided by either:

• SQL Server 2008
• SQL Azure