We are pleased to announce the launch of Grouply Social, a set of advanced features that transform your existing email lists and online groups into vibrant social networks!

Email lists and online discussion groups such as Yahoo Groups are the original online communities, but they lack the engaging social networking features of sites like Facebook and MySpace. Traditional online groups offer minimal user profiles, no privacy controls, and no concept of “friends” or profile-linking. As a result, the only way you get to know people is from the messages they post, and the 90% of group members who don’t post might as well not exist.

Grouply Social changes everything! Users can customize their own advanced profile pages to show their interests, personal history, and contact information; and to share photos, videos, and “widgets” from popular sites like YouTube and Slide. Grouply profile pages are dynamic and “smart”, updating automatically to reflect your friends list, your group memberships, and the conversations you’ve posted to, rated highly, bookmarked, or tagged. You can invite others—even people with whom you don’t share groups—to be your “friends” and access your profile page.

With Grouply’s advanced privacy controls, you decide who can access your profile page and what they see when they get there. Keep your list of groups and friends private if you like. Share your home address only with your friends and select groups. Share with your fellow group members the list of conversations you found interesting—or don’t. It’s all up to you.

Because Grouply gives you the capability not only to express yourself but also to maintain your privacy and control access at a very granular level, users are much more willing to share. As a result, you can meet and get to know your fellow group members in interesting new ways. Now your group experience is about the members in addition to the messages. Your groups have become social networks!

In addition to Grouply Social, new features in this release include:

• Grouply Alerts – Get real-time email Alerts for high-volume freecycling, buy/sell/swap, and job posting groups.
• Grouply for Freecyling – Freecycling and “re-gifting” group members will be particularly interested in the Grouply Alerts feature as well as the new Free Stuff message type and the “Mark as Taken” button.  For more on Grouply for Freecycling, see http://blog.grouply.com/freecycling.
• Advanced Event Management – Groups have long been used to organize and manage events, and now Grouply makes it even easier with a calendar view and an RSVP feature.
• Usability Enhancements – Use “Email This” to forward an interesting conversation you read about in Grouply to a friend. Hide conversations that aren’t of interest.
• Simplified User Experience – Based on user feedback, we changed the main tabs and simplified many of the pages in Grouply.

See the release announcement for more details. We encourage you to try out these new features and contact us at feedback@grouply.com to let us know what you think.

As always, thanks for your support, and thanks for using Grouply!