Symbiostock 2.0 & Symzio Pre-Release Previews

Great question – currently, as the images will be hosted off the individual sites, we cannot guarantee that everyone will have https enabled, or even have valid SSL certificates. In the future, Symzio will host all the images itself, but this is part of a later development stage.

So the answer is that currently, if you have an https, it is recommended those pages not display the widget. There is no way to prevent a mixed content error unless we pipe the images through Symzio, which will add unnecessary overhead to their loading. If people do want this option, however, we may opt to do this so it will work both in HTTPS and HTTP protocols.

The good news is the widget has a setting for this so it can auto-disable when/if https is the protocol being used.

You sure can. It’s all up to us, as contributors, to promote each other. Some people will use widgets, some won’t. I personally would love to have other people’s images on my site so that visitors get a richer experience. I’ll see if I can work something out for your HTTPS issue as I hadn’t thought of that before.

Hey Cristina,

Yes – Symzio is independent of Symbiostock. We want a filtered registration process in order to integrate some quality control over who syndicates their images through the network. This is ultimately necessary to avoid the pitfalls of the uncontrolled legacy networking system. For example – if someone were to purposely want to disrupt the networking system within Symbiostock, they could easily download the free plugin, upload nudity and keyword it for ‘apples’, then syndicate it so it shows up on peer sites. The fact that I’ve not heard of this happening with legacy is a testament to how awesome our community is. But with the new system, since we want to take this to the moon, we don’t want to leave that possibility open.

Also, as we are planning big things with Symzio in the future, having a registered account is necessary for all future functionality.

Basically, it provides an additional layer of security for all of us. We can feel safe syndicating images on our sites because every image comes from a legitimate Symzio contributor.

Related Products with Symbiostock 2.0 Preview

A particular issue with the existing Woocommerce system is its inefficiency with how it selects ‘Related Products’ that are displayed on individual product pages. For example, a stock photo of a red apple could show ‘related’ images of people rather than shots of other apples. This was a great concern for Symbiostockers and some… Continue reading –>
 

Just an update people – we are doing some final testing on Symbiostock 2.0 and hope to release it soon.

Symbiostock Express 2.0

Along with Symbiostock 2.0 will be a major update to Symbiostock Express. We are going to be standardizing our code in a way that permits updates and bug fixes to be a lot quicker, and accordingly a lot of CSS styles have been renamed slightly. For anyone who has created a child theme or added custom CSS, it will be reasonably simple to port your styles to the new names and we will provide a majority of the string replacements you will need to implement.

Symzio and reaching a Critical Mass

Aside from a massive amount of functionality upgrades and additions, the real gem is the Symzio widget. Our pressing goal is to make these sites permanently monetarily profitable, so this is the crucial point where we need to pool our combined footprint to promote one another. Once the widget is out, we should all aggressively promote both Symbiostock and Symzio, and implement the widget on our sites for maximum visitor recycling.

I will get more into it once it is out, and hopefully we will enter into some discussions about it, but in a nutshell:

It is all about conversions. Every visitor has a percentage chance of buying something. This is why, every single click they make, every single pixel they see, it all influences this percentage chance. The reason this percentage is all that matters is in the world of the internet, you’re never trying to reach that one person – you’re trying to reach that percentage based on a thousand people.

Therefore, if the percentage is 1%, then for every thousand people, 10 will buy something.

The two goals in any enterprise are this: Increase that percentage and increase the number of relevant visitors.

Symzio aggressively boosts these requirements.

1) By having a Symzio widget on every site, we are exponentially increasing the number of cumulative visitors the entire network sees. With each new Symbiostock artist, that number increases further. This is why more positive reviews, more members in the Artist Network, the more exposure the entire project gets, the more visitors each individual member gets access to.

2) By providing highly relevant results using advanced algorithms in a personalized and beautiful widget, we will be providing every visitor an increased number of relevant results for their search in an easy to digest manner. This means if they come to a site for apples, they will see different pictures of apples from different Symbiostock artists. This increased freedom of choice is bound to increase conversions and overall pageviews.

There will come a point where we will have enough cumulative exposure where a critical mass is created. This critical mass will tip the percentage to a perceptibly visible increase in conversions. Once we reach that point, there is no looking back.

Our goal should be to reach that critical mass as soon as possible.

…for once we do, we will truly and permanently have created an independent setting for all artists to monetize their media with absolute freedom and creative control.