We are very excited to share that Grouply is now part of Oodle!

Oodle — based in San Mateo, CA, just a few miles up Highway 101 from the Grouply office — is a pioneer in social commerce. With over 14 million monthly users, the Oodle Marketplace lets users easily buy, sell, lend and give with other friends, friends-of-friends, and other real people in their local community. Oodle will leverage the Grouply product and the team’s expertise in online communities to help build the social marketplace.

At Grouply, our goal from the very beginning was to become the premier online destination for users to connect with others who share their interests. Thanks to all of your who helped us by using Grouply and providing feedback! It’s been a thrilling ride so far, and we’re excited to continue to advance the Grouply product and our objectives as part of Oodle.

Check out the Grouply/Oodle FAQ for more information. As always, feel free to contact us with your questions and feedback at support@grouply.com. We hope you will celebrate this milestone with us and continue to lend your support and enthusiasm as we move forward.

Mark Robins
Co-founder/CEO, Grouply

In earlier posts here and here we discussed some of the frustrations that group owners have felt in using Yahoo! Groups, Facebook, and other systems to help run their mothers clubs, alumni associations, elementary schools, book clubs, and discussion groups.  Turns out these group systems aren’t optimal for group members, either.  In this post we will present the major pain points reported by group members, and we will highlight how Grouply’s understanding of your real-time interests enables a better, more personalized user experience.

Group member pain points

At Grouply, we have surveyed and interviewed hundreds of users across dozens of online group systems (e.g., Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, Ning, Facebook) about what they like and don’t like.  The top two “pain points” reported by group members are:

• Information overload – Some people receive hundreds of messages a day across all their groups, making it impossible to keep up.
• Limited recommendations – Nothing is done to help members discover new groups, friends, or content.

Grouply addresses these issues by tracking the real-time interests of our users and using that information to help filter messages and recommend groups, people, and content.

Tracking real-time interests

How does Grouply track your interests?  Let’s look at a typical user.  Abby Burns is a 30-year old mother of two.  She loves American Idol, golf, wine tasting, cooking, and being a mom.  Abby uses Grouply to engage in her passions through her online groups, and in so doing, she is expressing her real-time interests in various topics:

• She joins a new golf discussion group – interest in golf
• She posts a message to her wine tasting club about Pinot noir – interest in wine in general and Pinot noir in particular
• She reads, bookmarks, or searches for messages on preschools in her mothers club – interest in preschools

Since Grouply tracks and remembers all these activities, Grouply understands how Abby’s interests fluctuate over time.  In January, for example, Abby posts and reads far more messages in her American Idol fan club than in her golf group, indicating a much stronger interest in American Idol at that time.  And this makes complete sense, since the new AI season is just getting underway in January but the golf links are still closed!

Grouply tracks user interests over time

Grouply uses what it knows about Abby’s real-time interests to improve her experience in Grouply.  Let’s see how.

“Smart filters” combat information overload

Each day in her inbox, Abby receives a Grouply Smart Digest email – a personalized summary of all the activities that have occurred across all of her groups in the last 24 hours.  The Smart Digest highlights what’s interesting to Abby and hides what’s not, allowing her to keep up with her groups in much less time.  For example, Grouply knows that Abby recently read a posting about preschools in her mothers club, so Abby’s Smart Digest emphasizes the new comment that was just posted to that same thread.  Grouply also knows that Abby has ignored several other recent conversations in that group, so when new comments are posted to those threads, they are hidden from Abby by default.

The Smart Digest highlights what’s interesting to you and hides what’s not

Grouply provides Abby a number of other “smart filters” that help her quickly focus on the few messages she is likely to be interested in among the hundreds that get posted to her groups each day:

• Crowd filters – Grouply shows Abby the topics that are most popular among her fellow group members today.
• Saved searches and alerts – Abby can tell Grouply exactly what she’s looking for – say a used Big Bertha golf club or discussions about Kelly Clarkson.  When a message is posted that matches Abby’s criteria, Grouply sends her an email alert.

Grouply enables social discovery

Grouply suggests people you might want to meet and groups you might want to join.  Since Abby helps run her mothers club, she is very interested in meeting others who run parenting groups so she can share best practices with them and collect new ideas.  Each time Abby logs in to Grouply, Grouply suggests new parenting group administrators with whom she might like to connect.

Since Abby recently joined a cooking group, Grouply suggests other cooking-related groups that she might like to join.  And Grouply’s Facebook application recommends groups to Abby based on the current interests and activities in her Facebook profile!

Grouply recommends people and groups based on your real-time interests

As Abby reads a conversation in Grouply, she can see which of her fellow group members also viewed the thread.  Perhaps she notices that she and Eve Franken, a fellow mothers club member, tend to read a lot of the same postings.  Abby doesn’t know Eve, but maybe she should!  So Abby clicks over to Eve’s profile page.

Grouply shows which of your group members share your real-time interests

Eve is not the type of person to spend a lot of time “dressing up” her profile page, but fortunately Grouply has been dynamically tracking and collecting Eve’s real-time interests for her – the messages she has been posting and viewing and the groups she recently joined.  Abby quickly discovers that Eve has also been reading up on preschools.  And hey, Eve also belongs to a wine tasting group – but a different one than Abby!  Abby has found a new group to join and a new person to meet.  She sends a quick note to Eve:

“Hi, Eve!  You and I are both in the Pleasantville Mothers Club, and I see from your profile that you are into wine.  Me, too! …”

Grouply, real-time interests, and the interest graph

Hopefully it’s clear that Grouply provides Abby (and everyone!) a far more personalized and improved experience through real-time interest tracking.  And we’re just getting started!

As Grouply builds up information about user interests, we begin to assemble an “interest graph” that shows how we are all connected to each other through our shared interests.  Like the “social graph”, the interest graph has the potential to enable all sorts of exciting new web applications.  More on this in an upcoming post!

The Interest Graph

Ning announced today that they will be eliminating their free offering. Existing Ning networks will have to either start paying or move elsewhere.

Grouply offers a free alternative to Ning. A “social group” on Grouply provides much of the same functionality as a Ning network, including a customizable community website, event management, discussion forums, an activity feed, and an app store with dozens of useful applications. In addition, Grouply’s “social groups” provide benefits not found on Ning networks such as:

• Comprehensive email interface – Post and receive all content via email if you like.
• Group analytics – Gain useful insights with charts and graphs showing the most active members, the most popular topics, and member participation over time.
• Advanced website privacy – Make some pages public, some for visitors, and others for members only.
• Cross-group admin dashboard – Review and approve members and messages for all your groups in one place.

To learn more about Grouply, take a tour.  Or create a new social group on Grouply now.  It’s free!   And Grouply has no intention of ever discontinuing our free offering. Grouply also offers premium services similar to Ning’s should they make sense for your group.

We are committed to making it as easy as possible to migrate your Ning network to Grouply. In fact, you can import members of your Ning network into a Grouply social group right now! In the coming days, we will provide details on a more comprehensive “Ning to Grouply” migration tool that is already in the works.

If you are a Ning Network Creator interested in Grouply, please contact us at feedback@grouply.com and let us know your requirements. We’d love to work with you to make your migration to Grouply as seamless as possible!

Mark Robins
CEO, Grouply

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.

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!

This has certainly been an eventful few days for us here at Grouply. The good news is that we experienced a huge surge in our user base. The bad news is that some of our new users got upset quickly and left. How did this happen?

First some background. Like all social sites, Grouply offers templates to assist users with inviting their friends to join. Grouply, as you would expect, offers an “Invite My Group” feature that allows a user to post a message to one or more of her groups about Grouply. It’s really little more than a box with some editable default text, plus some check boxes to indicate which groups you want to send to. Pretty simple. Too simple, as it turns out.

For some reason, on Super Bowl Sunday when they should have been watching football, a number of Grouply users decided it was a good time to start inviting all their groups to Grouply. And then the new Grouply users invited all their groups, including the original groups. And so on. You see where this is going? Some groups wound up getting “hit” over and over with the same invitation, and the next thing we know, Grouply was labeled a spammer. We want you to love Grouply, and now people think we’re a spammer. Nobody loves a spammer. Nobody.

We screwed up, and we suffered for it. Bigtime. Grouply has been knocked down and dragged around on message boards and our own beloved Yahoo Groups all over the place – from knitting groups in Canada, to school groups in Australia, to graphics groups in Germany, and adult groups the world over. And it hurt. The virality of the internet giveth and it taketh away.

In between taking hits, we also managed to fix a few things. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

1. Restricted “Invite My Group”
If a group has already been invited to Grouply, why invite them again? Why, indeed. Well now you can’t. As of Monday, we disabled the Invite My Group feature for any group that was invited to Grouply in the previous 30 days. So you should no longer be seeing multiple Grouply invites in a group. If you do, then it’s a bug, and you should let us know about it at support@grouply.com .

2. Self-Service Delete
After seeing all the Grouply invitations, a number of users were understandably concerned about this “Grouply thing” and wanted out. Although they could “disconnect” their Groups from within Grouply, they wanted their accounts to be wiped from our system with all data erased. And unfortunately Grouply didn’t yet have this capability. So the process was for them to email us, and for us to delete them one by one. Needless to say, we spent several very late nights handling the requests, and our users had to wait far too long for confirmation that everything was taken care of. I am happy to report that we have added a feature where you can delete your account yourself, right from within Grouply. You can get immediate results … and we can get some sleep.

3. List Owner Controls
Some group owners, seeing all the Grouply invites flying around, felt as though their group had been “hijacked”. This soured them on the whole Grouply idea, and now, unfortunately, Grouply has been banned from a few groups. Again, not a great situation to be in for a company whose goal is to be loved. “Banned” doesn’t equal “loved” in any language I’m aware of.

We are now working with some list owners to develop the first of what we hope to be many owner controls for Grouply. Group owners will be able to decide if they want their group to be accessible in Grouply at all. They will also be able to disable the Invite My Group button for their group if that’s not the sort of thing their group allows. We expect to introduce these owner control features into Grouply in the next few days.

So that’s where we are. We blew it on Super Bowl Sunday, got to work fixing things by the fourth quarter, and now four days later we are on the road to recovery (knock on wood). Not bad for an internet company, right? And we’ll keep listening – because we’re not done yet. So please continue to send your comments and suggestions to feedback@grouply.com or to me directly at mark@grouply.com .

For those of you who stuck with us, we thank you for your patience and understanding. For those who left, there are no hard feelings whatsoever on our end, and we hope to see you back again on Grouply whenever you’re comfortable with returning. If you have any questions about Grouply or our security or privacy policies, please check out our FAQ page.

So long for now.

Mark
Co-founder/CEO, Grouply

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UPDATE: Several owners and moderators from ListHelp, EmailList-Managers (ELM), and Yahoo Group of Groups (YGOG), and GroupManagersForum (GMF) have created a new group called GrouplyImprovements where Grouply management is working with group owners to resolve outstanding issues and develop new Grouply features.  We are posting regularly to GrouplyImprovements with progress updates.  You can join GrouplyImprovements here.

Thanks to all of you who referred friends and fellow group members to Grouply as part of the Grouply 2007 Holiday Contest over the last few weeks!  The contest has now come to an end.  Per the contest rules, two Grouply users were randomly selected among all of the entries.  Following are the two winners:

• Surya K. won the Nintendo Wii video game system
• Barbara E. won the 16GB iPod Touch

Congratulations, Surya and Barbara!

Of course, just because the contest is over, doesn’t mean you should stop inviting people to Grouply. As more of your friends and fellow group members use Grouply, your Grouply experience gets even better! Messages are organized better, and you can more easily discover what’s most popular and interesting in your groups. So please continue to tell your friends about Grouply!

Thanks for using Grouply, and Happy Holidays everyone!