As an engineering student in India, Srihari Yamanoor knew he wanted to get a graduate degree in the United States to expand the career opportunities available to him, especially in North America and Europe. Over the course of many months, Srihari struggled through the GRE test, graduate school applications, and the visa process. It all paid off – Srihari got into Stanford and earned two graduate degrees in engineering. But he realized that the process could have been much easier and less stressful if he had some advice and mentoring along the way.

So Srihari created the GRE-Success Yahoo! Group to help people who want to earn a graduate degree in North America and Europe. GRE-Success now has over 2,300 members and continues to grow quickly.

While the Yahoo! Group offered a forum for members to ask specific questions, it did not provide an overview of the entire process. So Srihari started a wiki and created pages covering such topics as the GRE structure, the Statement of Purpose on applications, and how to get a credit card. But having two different systems proved confusing and burdensome. Many users weren’t aware of the wiki and asked questions already answered there. Furthermore, Srihari had to maintain access controls in both places.

“I realized that the Yahoo! Group alone could not meet the needs of the group, but there was no way to migrate the group to another system without losing hundreds of members,” said Srihari. “Our Grouply website integrates the wiki and the Yahoo! Group in one place. Users can find everything they need, and I have only one set of access controls to manage. In addition, Grouply provides useful statistics that help me manage the group. For example, Grouply tells me which content is most widely read so I can focus on the areas of greatest interest to my members.”

The “green movement” is many things to many people: a philosophy, a political campaign, technologies.  To Eric Snyder, it is a way of life – i.e., the small choices in his everyday life that reduce any negative impact that his lifestyle has on the planet.  For instance to reduce landfill waste, Eric often gives away or “freecycles” perfectly usable items (e.g., TVs, chairs, board games) that he no longer wants to other people rather than throwing them away.

To help others do this in his hometown of Ottawa, Canada, Eric created a FullCircles Ottawa group on Yahoo Groups.  People post messages about items they no longer want, and other members “claim” them.  FullCircles Ottawa has 9500 members who have “rescued” tens of thousands items from the landfills.

At first, Eric was happy to have the Yahoo Group deliver the messages that facilitated the exchange of the “re-used” item.  But the Yahoo Group no longer meets all of his needs.  To increase the impact of the group, he realized that he needed to educate people more about freecycling and sustainable lifestyles.  He also found that he spent too much time “coaching” members to include the right information in each message.

“I wanted to embed videos and other resources about green lifestyles on my Yahoo Group, but I couldn’t.” says Eric Snyder, founder of FullCircles Ottawa.  “With Grouply, it literally took seconds to add new pages and embed videos throughout.  The best part is that Grouply required no migration from my Yahoo Group – it just automatically integrated it.  With other systems, I would have to leave Yahoo Groups and lose thousands of members in the process.”

In addition, the Grouply website provides message templates that ensure that members include the right information when they post.  Eric also uses the group analytics in Grouply to monitor membership and increase group activity.

Today we are excited to announce the launch of “social groups” on Grouply!  A social group is a new type of online community that combines the best features of social networking sites and traditional online groups. The press release is online here.

As we discussed previously, traditional online groups systems such as Yahoo! Groups – with dead-simple email interfaces accessible to everyone – are really good at fostering rich dialogue among members.  And since there are so many online groups out there – Yahoo! Groups alone offers more than 9 million with 110 million members – you are sure to find a group that matches your interests.  The two main issues with traditional online groups are that they don’t offer customizable websites and they lack the modern social networking features that users have come to expect on sites like Facebook.

Facebook, as we have said, offers strong interactivity features and the ability to share rich media and express yourself in a variety ways.  Plus the Facebook site itself looks clean and professional, unlike traditional online groups, which were designed primarily for email interaction.  However, Facebook Groups lack customization tools and email-based discussion support.  The typical Facebook Group turns out to be a “profile label” rather than a real group with a defined objective, active discussions, and a passionate user base.

Social groups on Grouply give you the best of both worlds!  Social groups offer the social interactivity, media sharing, and modern design of social networking sites like Facebook.  Social groups also provide the rich discussions, popular email interface, and people-discovery opportunities found in traditional online group systems like Yahoo! Groups.

While social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace help you reconnect with people you already know, social groups help you discover new people who share your interests.  In other words, social groups are built around what you are interested in rather than who you already know.

With Grouply, you can create a new social group about anything you like, or join a social group and connect with others who share your interests.  If you already run an existing online group on Google and Yahoo! Groups, you can give your group an “extreme makeover” on Grouply!  Your old-style email list gets a brand new, modern, professional, fully customizable website that automatically interoperates with Google and Yahoo! Groups.  All for free!

We think you are going to love the new Grouply.  To find out more about social groups on Grouply, take a tour.  Or, just dive in and create a new social group on Grouply. Get out there and connect with others who share your interests and passions!

In my last post, I discussed Yahoo! Groups and what it does well – and not so well – in meeting the online needs of parenting groups, alumni associations, book clubs, discussion groups, and other organizations.  In this post, I examine how social networking sites – specifically Facebook – stack up against these requirements.

While not the first social network, Facebook has become the de facto standard for social networking with an amazing 350 million users. With features such as rich media sharing, activity feeds, and dynamic user profiles, Facebook is great for keeping up with old friends. As social networking has become more popular, users have come to expect these features in their online groups experience as well.  Given its overall strength in social networking, you might assume that we’d see a growing population of successful, high-functioning, real groups over on Facebook.  This turns out not to be the case.

Groups as profile labels

Let’s take a look at one of the most popular groups on Facebook.  It’s called “I Don’t Care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass”.  Yes, that’s its real name, and it has over 1.4 million members.  So what can we conclude from this?  Are there really over a million people with a strong desire to discuss their dislike for rubber shoes with holes in them?  Of course not.  Clearly, this is not a real group.  It lacks an overarching objective, an engaged member base, and active discussions.  In fact, the sole purpose of this group, it would seem, is to enable members to showcase their sense of humor to their friends by listing the group’s name as a “label” on their profiles and in their activity feeds.

Here’s another example.  The BASKETBALL group on Facebook has over 5,000 members.  About 10 posts per month appear in the discussion forums there.  The third most popular discussion is titled “I love basketball” and includes the postings “I love it too, basketball rocks!!!” and “basketball is the best sport ever.”  Compare this to Coaching Hoops, a typical basketball-related group on Yahoo! Groups.  The 500 members of Coaching Hoops include practicing high school and college coaches, and the group generates about 250 posts a month on topics such as shooting techniques and the most effective way to provide feedback to players.

Yahoo! Groups tend to be real, functioning groups with clear objectives and active discussions by passionate members. Facebook Groups, on the other hand, are often little more than “profile labels” — essentially badges that help us express who we are.

Friend-optimized

This is not to say that Facebook Groups are devoid of useful features.  Let’s have a closer look at what Facebook Groups does well and where it falls short in meeting the needs of real groups.

• Good promotion capabilities – Facebook’s ability to spread the word about your group via activity feeds is incredibly powerful.  Is there any other explanation for how a group about crocs has attracted 1.6 million members?  Clearly, if you want to grow your group membership, Facebook can help in a big way.
• Uncustomizable – Facebook has a clean-looking, nicely organized user interface.  But if you want to customize your group site on Facebook with your own color scheme, layout, URL, additional pages, and group-specific apps, then you will be disappointed.  In fact, Facebook does not offer groups a website, per se.  Rather, a group’s “site” on Facebook is really just a small collection of standard Facebook pages that have been repurposed with almost no changes for groups.
• No email interface – Facebook does not allow you to post content to your group or to receive group updates via email.  As we have seen, the highly accessible email interface of Yahoo! Groups is responsible, to a large extent, for the rich dialogue that exists in many groups there.
• Missing content types – Facebook Group members cannot post job openings, items for sale or free, or general announcements – all standard content types found in real online groups.
• Limited ability to discover new friends – Users often join groups in order to meet like-minded people.  But Facebook’s privacy options do not allow users to share profile information with fellow group members.  As a result, options for getting to know fellow group members are limited.

The bottom line is that Facebook is optimized for interacting with your friends, not your groups.  Facebook lacks many of the features required by parenting groups, alumni chapters, discussion groups and other “real” groups.  As a result, the activity level on Facebook Groups tends to be relatively low.  When a real group like an alumni chapter creates a Facebook Group, they tend to do so mainly for marketing purposes.

In my next post, I’ll discuss how the new Grouply offers the best features of traditional online groups like Yahoo! Groups and modern social networking sites like Facebook.

We’re often asked how we came up with the idea for Grouply. As we approach a major upgrade of the Grouply service, I thought a little retrospective musing might be in order.

When we were developing the initial concept of Grouply, we drew upon our own frustrating experiences running and participating in online groups. We also conducted a number of focus groups and interviews with leaders and members of groups of all sorts – mothers clubs, alumni associations, elementary schools, book clubs, discussion groups, etc. Groups, we discovered, employ a variety of online tools to meet their needs – Evite to collect RSVPs, stand-alone websites to share information with prospective members, Google Calendar to show upcoming events, and many more. There was one common thread, however. Every group we talked to – every single one – used Yahoo! Groups or, to a lesser extent, Google Groups to communicate important information and to facilitate discussions among members.

Some of these groups had been around for years and had accumulated hundreds of members and thousands of messages in their archives. We quickly realized that it would be extremely difficult to convince owners of such groups to abandon all this and restart on Grouply.

That’s when it hit us! Instead of creating a system to replace their existing online groups, why not integrate with and improve their groups in place? The initial concept of Grouply was born!

Yahoo! Groups Strengths

The next step for us was to figure out what features to focus on first. With over 110 million users, Yahoo! Groups clearly provides value for a lot of people. In fact, Yahoo! Groups does some things quite well:

• Email interface encourages broad participation – Yahoo! Groups benefits from a dead-simple email interface. You can post content to your group by sending to a group email address, and you can read content via email if you like. So if you can use email, you can use Yahoo! Groups. The email interface has enabled groups such as Harry Potter for Grownups to a develop a highly engaged member base and archives of over 180,000 messages.
• Breadth of groups enables you to explore your interests – There are over 9 million Yahoo! Groups covering every conceivable topic. Yahoo! Groups is a good way to engage with others around the subjects you care about.

Yahoo! Groups Deficiencies

Of course, Yahoo! Groups isn’t perfect. The fact that so many groups cobble together third-party features such as Evite and Google Calendar is evidence that Yahoo! Groups does not offer a group solution that suits everyone. Here are some areas where Yahoo! Groups is lacking:

• No customization or expansion options – Community websites like Metal Web News want a single website with multiple tabs and pages that all reflect a professional, unique “look and feel”. However, Yahoo! Groups provides no capability to create and expand a customized website.
• Hard to search for and locate content – Each message posted to a Yahoo! Group appears as a simple, uncategorized block of text. Events, classified listings, announcements, and general discussion comments are initially indistinguishable, which limits your ability to quickly find what you are looking for. Instead, you must read each posting to determine its topic and relevance, which quickly becomes overwhelming.
• Limited ability to connect with others – Profile pages on Yahoo! Groups are static and usually empty, so the only way to learn anything about fellow group members is by reading their posts. Since only 10% of group members post, it is surprisingly difficult to get to know 90% of the members in your Yahoo! Groups.
• No monetization capability – Groups like the Iron Horse Mothers Club charge annual membership dues and run a number of fee-based events each year. Yahoo! Groups provides no e-commerce capabilities to help with this.
• Limited event management – The Kimiz Volleyballerz group uses Yahoo! Groups to discuss volleyball-related topics, but they use Meetup.com to collect RSVPs for games.

Over these last two years at Grouply, we have focused on fixing those areas where Yahoo! Groups falls short with the goal of developing a single offering that provides all that you need to run a successful online group.

In my next post, I’ll investigate how well social networking sites like Facebook meet the needs of real online groups.

We’re excited to announce the release of Grouply 4.0, including a number of exciting features for group owners!

Running an active and growing online group is hard work. Reviewing membership requests, communicating with members, and approving postings can consume a lot of time. With Grouply’s new features for group owners, you can manage your groups in 80% less time! Grouply now offers the following:

• Grouply Analytics – Grouply’s charts and graphs highlight interesting trends such as message volume and member participation over time so you can take corrective action when necessary.
• Approval Dashboard – Grouply provides you a single dashboard where you can approve messages and members for all your groups and communicate with members using “canned” templates.
• Key Member Tracker – Grouply identifies key group members so you can enlist their help to grow your group, improve group health, and achieve even greater success!

Grouply automatically detects if you are the owner or moderator of one or more groups and adds a powerful “Manage” tab to your Grouply interface. Click the manage tab to access all of these features and more!

See screenshots and read more about Grouply’s benefits for group owners here.

Grouply users have long enjoyed the time-saving and social benefits of accessing their Yahoo Groups through Grouply. Well now these benefits are available for your Google Groups, too! If you are already a Grouply user, go to Manage Yahoo and Google Accounts to add your Google Groups to your Grouply account in one quick step. The next time you login, you’ll be able to access all your Yahoo and Google Groups in Grouply!

With Grouply Social Inbox, you no longer have to provide your Yahoo ID and password to use Grouply. You can use Grouply just like you would another email service such as Gmail or Hotmail, but with the added benefits of Grouply’s exciting time-saving and social networking features!

Now when you register with Grouply, you choose between the Automatic and Manual setup options. Choose Manual, and Grouply assigns you a grouply.com email address (e.g., jsmith@grouply.com). Just follow a few simple instructions to update your Yahoo Groups to send group messages to your grouply.com address. In just a few minutes, you’ll be enjoying the benefits of Grouply with no Yahoo password required!

The moment you register, Grouply automatically and instantly upgrades all of your Yahoo Groups into engaging social networks. Grouply’s social features enrich your experience and encourage you to spend time on the site. A message in email or on Yahoo Groups is simple text, but that same message viewed in Grouply is accompanied by a host of exciting social information such as shared tags and the photos of other people who found the message interesting. Click a person’s photo to see his Grouply profile page and find out more about him.

You can design your Grouply profile page to express yourself in a variety of ways. Share photos and videos, your contact information, your list of groups, or your favorite TV shows. If you like, set your Grouply profile page to update automatically to display messages you found interesting and to generate a blog of the messages you posted. But don’t worry, group messages in Grouply are never visible to those outside the group, and Grouply inlcudes a powerful set of privacy controls so you can determine precisely who can see what on your profile page.

After just a few minutes of use, you quickly discover that Grouply’s time-saving features help you keep up with your social networks far more efficiently!

• Grouply Smart Digest – Each day you receive a personalized Smart Digest email covering what’s happened across all your social networks in the last 24 hours, highlighting what’s interesting to you and hiding what’s not based on your previous behavior.
• Grouply Alerts – You can have Grouply notify you via email when a new message is posted to one of your social networks that matches what you’re looking for. This is particularly helpful when you want to leverage your social networks for something timely and specific, such as finding a new job, collecting preschool advice, or claiming a used iPod from a reuse group.
• Grouply Smart Search – Search across all your social networks at once. Quickly discover new comments on topics that have interested you in the past or that are popular among other members of your social networks.

We hope you enjoy Grouply Social Inbox, and we look forward to delivering more exciting features in the months to come! Please drop us a line at feedback@grouply.com if you have suggestions to share.

Grouply 3.1 is Here!

We are pleased to announce that Grouply 3.1 is now available! In this release we smooth the process for new users to adopt and begin using Grouply, and we add a number of other useful features requested by and designed with the help of Grouply users. Send your ideas for new features to feedback@grouply.com.

Web Connect: Grouply at Your Own Pace
In 3.1, new Grouply users can adopt Grouply at their own pace. Now when you sign up with Grouply, your Yahoo Groups settings remain unchanged and you continue to receive individual emails and Daily Digests from Yahoo Groups as before. In addition, you will begin to receive the Grouply Smart Digest once a day, and you will have access to the Grouply website where you can discover all of the time-saving and social benefits of using Grouply. Over time, as you become more comfortable with it, you can begin to conduct more and more of your group interactions exclusively through Grouply.

Grouply’s advanced Web Connect feature makes this possible. With Web Connect, you can maintain whatever settings you like in Yahoo Groups and still use Grouply. Starting in 3.1, when a new user registers with Grouply, all of his groups are put on Web Connect by default. Existing users can choose between Web Connect and Email Connect for their groups on Update Group Access.

Individual Emails: A Yahoo Thing (Again)
Previously if you accessed a group through Grouply and wanted to receive each message as an individual email, Grouply constructed and sent you its own version of the Yahoo Groups individual email, complete with Grouply logo in the footer. Unfortunately, Grouply individual emails weren’t perfect. Sometimes links were missing. Sometimes they just didn’t look right. Starting in 3.1, Grouply no longer provides our own individual emails. Instead, Grouply users receive individual emails from Yahoo Groups, either directly (for groups on Web Connect) or indirectly via forwarding (for groups on traditional Email Connect). You can review and update your Email Subscripitions in Grouply on Manage Email Subscriptions.

Signed … You!
A key feature of many email systems is the ability to create a “signature” – predefined text that is added by default to the bottom of all of the emails you send. Many of our users told us that, despite all of the advantages of posting group messages through Grouply, the lack of signature support was the reason they still preferred to post through email. Well, no more, because signatures are now available in Grouply! Set up your signature on Manage Signature.

Advanced Reply
Click Reply on any posting in Grouply, and you can reply to the individual or to the group. In addition, the reply text box is pre-populated with the previous message, so you can easily snip and quote excerpts from what was said before.

Plain Text, Plain and Simple
Some groups encourage or require members to submit postings in plain text format. And let’s face it, sometimes plain text is just easier and better than rich text or HTML. By default, postings in Grouply are now created in plain text — but the rich text option is there if you want it!

Shared Friends
Sometimes when giving someone the once over, it helps to know who you know in common. Now Grouply tells you! In Grouply, member lists and friend requests include a link called “shared friends”. Click it to see a list of the friends you share in common.

Hide/Show Quoted Text Gets Even Smarter
Don’t you hate it when everyone replies on top of everyone else, creating ginormous postings that make conversations really difficult to follow? Fortunately, Grouply automatically detects and suppresses all this “quoted text”, but unfortunately, Grouply often hides more than it should. In 3.1, hide/show quoted text is much smarter, making it easier than ever to follow conversations in Grouply!

Coming Soon – No Yahoo Password Required!
We are continuing to improve the registration process and to make Grouply more accessible to more people. In 3.2, you will be able to register with Grouply without providing your Yahoo password. Stay tuned, and thanks for using Grouply!

Yahoo issued clarifications today regarding password security and third-party websites. Grouply welcomes these clarifications from Yahoo, as they reaffirm Grouply’s compliance with Yahoo’s Terms of Service and Groups Guidelines.

Yahoo acknowledges that it is not a TOS violation to provide your Yahoo password to a third-party site like Grouply. In fact, millions of users have provided their Yahoo passwords to third-party sites like Meebo, the instant messaging aggregator, and to wireless carriers such as T-Mobile so that they can read their Yahoo Mail on a mobile device. Providing your password to a third party site does carry risks, however, and users are advised to exercise caution when doing so.

Grouply uses your Yahoo password to collect your group list and group messages from the Yahoo Groups website. We do not use it to collect your photos, files, databases or any other group content, and we do not use it to access your Yahoo Mail or any other Yahoo service. When Yahoo provides an API for Yahoo Groups, which we understand is being worked on, then Grouply will no longer ask users to provide their Yahoo password.

Grouply protects your Yahoo password. Your password is encrypted and is accessible only by the Grouply application, not directly by a human. Grouply has been certified by TRUSTe, a leading advocate for consumer internet privacy. Click here for more on how Grouply protects your Yahoo password.

Grouply provides a number of features for group owners such as an automatic group newsletter, group statistics, most popular topics, and other interesting summaries. Grouply Social helps build community in the group. Grouply’s time-saving features like the Smart Digest improve member satisifaction. However, Grouply respects the right of a group owner to determine whether Grouply is suitable for her group. Grouply recently released Grouply Owner Controls to give group owners the ability to block their group from Grouply in less than a minute and without providing any personal information.

Grouply understands the privacy of group messages and incorporates strict controls to ensure that privacy is maintained. Third-party websites like Gmail and inbox.com include controls to ensure that the Yahoo Groups messages you forward to them are not available to other users. Similarly, Grouply prevents other users from seeing your group messages. To see a group’s messages in Grouply, you must be a member of the group. You cannot see any messages in Grouply that you couldn’t see when logged in to the Yahoo Groups website. Click here for more on how Grouply protects your group messages.

We at Grouply look forward to continuing to serve our users and improving the Grouply service.

UPDATE: We are pleased to report that you can now use Grouply without providing your Yahoo password!