APIs are amazing!
November 12, 2012
APIs are amazing!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Modules Used
- Social Plug-Ins
Overall Satisfaction
- Out of the box, this is very easy to set up. No technical knowledge is required.
- The APIs are amazing if you need to do custom extensions to out-of-the-box functionality..
- Company is fantastic to work with. The support team is extremely responsive and helpful. Among the best support I've ever experienced from a software vendor.
- Metrics and dashboards very useful. We can learn how we are doing as we go along, make course changes and then iterate.
- We are looking at gamification module. Currently we have an award system in place: If someone makes five posts, we reward them with a gift or kudos. We have this functionality from another vendor, but as Gigya offers essentially the same thing, we would rather have everything from a single vendor as it would be easier to manage.
- Integrate comments with other external social comments. Gigya is great at pushing out comments /sharing them with social networks. I wish we could ingest comments from social media sites. For example, I would love to be able to pull tweets into the commenting platform. Gigya is good at pushing content out, but not at taking it in.
- I wish we could customize the platform a little more. There are numerous plug-ins for chat etc. but we would like the flexibility to be able to do a bit more customization. The tools is very solid and easy to set-up, but we would like a bit more flexibility.
- One we implemented the social log-in functionality, our user base increased by 40%. As soon as people could lo-gin through Facebook and Twitter, we grew rapidly.
- Comments have increased three-fold. Through the sharing capability, registered users share content on FB, and then others click on the link and come to us for the first time.
- LiveChat. Our user base is very dedicated and engaged. LiveChat is really a service for our most engaged power users. This provides them with something they want and makes them even more engaged.
Product Usage
- Gigya manages authentication / log-in, commenting, live streams and content sharing.
- Live stream is relatively new. We use this whenever we have a live video event on the site, the functinality allows our users to chat with each other about the video content as it s happening. If we have web events with guest speakers, users can also ask the questions directly.
- Sharing: Users can easily share all content from Facebook / Twitter / Pinterst
Evaluation and Selection
We had been using a home-grown tool for social log-in and for commenting.
We looked at some products that were being used by our parent corporate office. We also looked at a couple of other vendors, but Gigya was clearly the leader.
Implementation
- Vendor implemented
The big implementation task was migrating user comments over to the new system. They migrated 30 million comments from one system to another in about 10 days. .
Our requirements for comments were very particular, so this is something we built out ourselves with some help from Gigya. It took our developers two months to custom build the appropriate comments functionality and that had to be completed before migration began. They guided us through a lot of the custom design work, to make sure we were doing it right.
Guided us a lot through custom development to make sure we were doing it right.
Our requirements for comments were very particular, so this is something we built out ourselves with some help from Gigya. It took our developers two months to custom build the appropriate comments functionality and that had to be completed before migration began. They guided us through a lot of the custom design work, to make sure we were doing it right.
Guided us a lot through custom development to make sure we were doing it right.
Training
- Online training
Support
Yes - Our parent company negotiated a big contract. we are the first corporate entity the first entity to actually use the product, but we benefit from the maser contract conditions.