Development Update 025 — Data Export and Account Delete Features

Sociall’s New and Upcoming Features

Published in

sociall.io

4 min readAug 28, 2018

Here it is, our 25th Development Update - what a milestone! If you’re one of the thousands that have been following us for a while and waiting patiently for a glimpse of the Sociall Open Beta - thank you, and welcome back. If you’re new to this space and have just stumbled across us … you’re in luck. You have just discovered the next generation of social networking — we have been waiting for you.

Building a social platform that first and foremost prioritises the data security and privacy of its users is not an easy task. It requires a lot of people, a lot of expertise, and (we’re sure some have noticed) a lot of time. Our team is extremely passionate about creating something incredible, and creating it incredibly well, and we strive to have frequent feature releases and updates to share with our community.

With that being said, it’s time to announce our new Data Export and Account Delete Features!

Data Export and Account Delete

As mentioned in the last development blog post, the Sociall team developed two new features for the closed beta to comply with new GDPR regulations in Europe — Data Export and Account Delete. These two new features were the main reason for the open beta being pushed back as they required the whole development team’s full attention for planning, testing, and design for weeks on end.

The Data Export feature will bundle all of your account data (such as posts, profile, etc) as a ZIP file and send a download link to your verified email address. Sociall believes that the right to data access is extremely important.

The Account Delete function will permanently delete all of your data from Sociall. We believe that all Sociall users should have the right to be forgotten, so we will not store any backups of your information.

Facebook Migration Tool Demo

Last week we were lucky enough to have the whole team together for our very first live demo of the Facebook Migration Tool (pictured below). Scott and the development team went through an account sign-up on Sociall using the Facebook Migration Tool and demonstrated how simple and seamless the whole process was.

The Facebook Migration Tool is now in the final stages of development and in the next few days, will be handed over to Rod for extensive manual and automated testing. We will also start the approval process with Facebook today and we are very optimistic that it will go smoothly. If so, we should have the tool released to the closed beta sometime next week.

Upcoming Features

Before releasing the Open Beta, we still have a few micro-features to be pushed.

These include:

Moving our news feed builder to a micro-feature to improve load times.
Removing ‘First name’ and ‘Last name — instead using just ‘Name’. This is the route that Twitter has taken, and it’s proven to be extremely successful. It also helps accomodate businesses and organisations.
Splitting your news feed into 3 different sections — ‘Following’, ‘Recommended’, ‘All’.

The new news feed will work like so:

The ‘Following’ feed will consist of only people that you follow.
The ‘Recommended’ feed will be profiles that are related to the interests that you follow on Sociall.
The ‘All’ feed will consist of posts from literally everyone on Sociall. Of course, as always, all feeds will be chronologically ordered.

We are also planning, designing and investigating the following features for future releases:

The first phase of community moderation (self-governing). This will be a hybrid approach first, utilising both the community and in-house support, until a full self-governing model is ready in the coming months.
Using #tags on posts. These will be clickable and will link to a new news feed that contains posts with the same #tags.
Using @mentions to mention and notify another user in your post based on their username.
Adding in basic privacy settings for users. This will likely be two simple options — Public or Private.

Next week we will be introducing the latest team members to join our project plus updates on the progress of our Facebook Migration Tool release.