We just put together this walkthrough of Socialight’s iOS / iPhone Framework, and how it works together with the Admin portal. This will give you a good understanding of what our basic iOS apps look like and how they function, including the new features like Facebook integration and the updated note pages. You can get an app just like it for your own community.

The app featured is Kid Can Play. It’s available here for download from iTunes.

Socialight iOS Framework Demo from socialight on Vimeo.

One of the subtle, yet important differences between Socialight and most other social + local apps is that our social graph is, at its base, follower-based as opposed to friend-based. There’s good reason for this and it allows Socialight to be much more useful for the types of applications we concentrate on. More on this in a bit, but first some background.

Follower-based social graphs are like Twitter’s. The relationship is one-way. You might follow Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) along with 5 million others because you care what he has to say or think he’s funny, but Ashton probably doesn’t keep tabs on you and the other 5 million.

Facebook’s an example of a network founded as a friend-based, or a 2-way, social graph. When you’re friends with someone on Facebook, it implies a symmetrical trust relationship. Both parties must agree to connect. One initiates by inviting, the other accepts.

The social + local apps that concentrate first and foremost on presence information (i.e. “where are my friends now and what are they doing?”) like Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, and others are friend-based. That’s a good thing. In most cases, and for most people, making one’s location available to anyone who cares would be considered overkill at best or downright dangerous at worst. Sharing with friends only, on the other hand, can be useful.

Socialight concentrates on local content (recommendations & tips, stories, media) and less on sharing where I am in real-time. For much content, one-way trust is all that’s needed. Additional layers of privacy can be layered on top (like the option to require follower approval, or control access to certain Socialight communities) for more sensitive applications like when private content or check-ins are involved.

Our communities derive a lot of benefit from this: 1-way makes network-building much more efficient. It’s a single click to follow, rather than a request to “friend” followed by a notification to the target, followed by the accept, reject, or ignore response from the target. The network can grow – along with the associated network effect – much more quickly.

Even more importantly, this has positive implications in terms of what people are incentivized to share, the potential number of connections in the network you can grow, and consequently, the breadth of trusted tips our users find in the real world. On Socialight, place is another content filter applied on top of the social one, and when you combine notes with place, one-way relationships mean there can be more stuff from trusted sources around you. On Socialight-powered Travel Channel GO, you can follow Anthony Bourdain and see what he has to say about the places you’re near. And with OSes and environments that allow for background location updates like iOS 4, you can create apps using Socialight’s super-quick local search that push local notes from followed sources. Then things get really interesting.

This post wouldn’t be complete without discussing the relevant changes afoot at Facebook. They manage what is possibly the most active social graph, founded on the principle of 2-way relationships. Despite the downsides of 2-way graphs, Facebook flourished in part because it differentiated itself as a safe space where people could share intimate details about their lives. People joined specifically for this safe space. Like the social + local services I mentioned that are 2-way since their primary goal is to get users to say where they are, the privacy afforded by 2-way relationships was important. However, Facebook decided that in order to continue growing, and compete aggressively with newer services like Twitter, they needed to migrate much of their new and existing relationships from 2-way to 1-way. They began making more and more content public by changing users’ privacy settings, and by making more and more relationships 1-way (most significantly, via their Like button). They’ve found it’s a difficult shift. Now privacy advocates are up in arms, people are upset and confused, and many speculate that it’s costing them usage. People are getting behind potential alternatives like Diaspora, a concept being developed by NYU computer science grads – including 2 alumni of Socialight’s internship program, Daniel Grippi and Max Salzberg.

Our goal with Socialight is to let people share opinions, information, and stories about the world. This lets people navigate their neighborhoods and the globe more intelligently and playfully, learning, staying social, and hopefully saving time and money along with way. The decisions we make in designing our platform are often crucial to making this work and we thought we’d shed a little light on why we make some of them.

The two-week-long Kentucky Derby Festival leads up to the May 1^st Kentucky Derby.  It’s a huge festival and visitors can always use some help navigating it.  This year, thanks to Current Marketing in Louisville, Kentucky, visitors explored and shared their experiences in real-time with the Kentucky Derby Festival app.  Using the Socialight Community Platform, Katy Miller, Vice President, Message Deployment, seeded the Festival community with over 70 events throughout the Louisville region, and with our WYSIWYG iPhone creator, crafted an app that had over 6,000 downloads in the two-week period.  People found activities near them, browsed upcoming events, and shared their experiences with the community.

In Katy’s words:

Socialight’s platform is incredibly simple to use and produces a user-friendly and intuitive iPhone application. The success we had with downloads and marketing of the application were due in huge part to Socialight’s simple interface and publishing process.

Over 350 people used the app while at events to share updates and stories, along with photos of their families’ festival experiences.  We think Socialight is ideal for outdoor festivals and we’re going to continue updating our offerings to make it even better.

Calling all Socialight Community Owners… The best way to make your community come alive is to take it from the desktop to the streets by transforming it into a mobile app.  We want to help you with that, so we’ve decided that April is officially our “3 FOR FREE” month, where we will waive the iPhone app publishing fee, a $495 value.

Communities that generate 50 PLACES with 50 NOTES of content (including photos) AND complete their layout on the iPhone dashboard will be eligible to win and publish their iPhone app for free.  And who said nothing in life is FREE?? Not us!

You have until April 30th to complete this task. When you are ready to submit, send an email to apps@socialight.com with the subject:  “3 For Free” with the name of your community.  On May 1st, we will randomly pick three (3) apps which have at least 50/50… 50 PLACES & 50 NOTES.

So invite some friends, add new members, call your mother, or whatever it takes, but let’s get your show on the road!!

P.S. – Ideally, your community should serve a real need.  It could be anything, but a local guide to watercoolers just won’t cut it (although a pot hole directory would be cool).

P.P.S. – Void where prohibited.