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!

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!

One week ago today we announced that we would deliver a suite of controls for group owners to manage their groups in Grouply. I am pleased to announce that the first Grouply Owner Controls are now available.

With Grouply Owner Controls, group owners can control whether members can use Grouply’s Invite My Group feature. They can also block their group from using Grouply entirely if they want. Grouply Owner Controls are accessible whether or not your group is already in Grouply.

Each group has a “dashboard” where the group owner can make selections. Group owners do not need to register with Grouply or submit any personal information to access the dashboard. Instead, the owner goes to the Grouply Owner Controls start page and enters her group name. An owner authorization code (OAC) is then sent to her groupname-owner@yahoogroups.com email address. The group owner uses the code to access the owner dashboard for her group. The whole process takes less than a minute, and all selections are reversible; just revisit your group’s dashboard to make changes.

When an owner blocks her group, the group disappears entirely from Grouply. No group messages are accessible by anyone, and the group name will no longer display. All group members in Grouply are sent an email notifying them of the change. Group members who join Grouply in the future will not be able to use Grouply for the group. Here is an example of what group members see for a blocked group on the Update Group Access page in Grouply.

We would like to thank the members and moderators of GrouplyImprovements for helping design this first release of Grouply Owner Controls. GrouplyImprovements is an independently run group created by moderators from EmailList-Managers, Group Managers Forum, ListHelp, and Yahoo Group of Groups — the four most highly regarded “groups about Yahoo Groups” in existence.

We are now collecting requirements for follow-on Owner Controls features including the Owner Newsletter, a weekly email for group owners including useful statistics about your group. The Owner Newsletter feature is being discussed and developed in GrouplyImprovements. Join GrouplyImprovements today and make your voice heard!

If you encounter any issues using Grouply Owner Controls or have any suggestions, please contact us at support@grouply.com .

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!

With this upgrade, Grouply provides you more flexibility in how you connect to and interact with your groups.  Grouply can now collect your group messages directly from the Yahoo Groups website instead of via email.  You can receive your Smart Digest and individual group messages at many different email addresses if you want.  And based on user feedback, we redesigned the message search results page, the message detail pages, and several other pages, so Grouply now looks better and is easier to use than ever! Following are some of the key features in this upgrade.

Multiple Email Addresses

Advanced Profile Page

Like you, we love our online groups!  But we struggled for years trying to keep up with our alumni associations, teams, professional organizations, neighborhood associations, discussion boards, mailing lists, Yahoo Groups, and Google Groups.  All the events, announcements, classified ads, job postings, and questions and answers piling up in our inboxes left us suffering from information overload.  Eighteen months ago we decided to do something about it.

Today we are pleased to announce that Grouply is open to the general public!

A special thanks goes out to our beta users, especially to participating members of the Mothers & More Club of Redmond/Sammamish and the Burlingame Mothers Club.  Without your valuable feedback and assistance, Grouply would not be what it is today.  OK, here’s the windup, and the pitch…

With Grouply, you can keep up with your existing online groups in 80% less time.  You receive a Grouply Smart Digestâ„¢ email each day that summarizes what’s going on across all your groups, highlighting what’s interesting to you and hiding what’s not.  You can view a single cross-group event calendar, see what’s popular among fellow group members, and quickly search or browse across all your existing groups from one place.  Grouply works with Yahoo Groups currently and support for more systems is on the way.

Grouply is free and takes just seconds to join.  Why not sign up now?  And please drop us a line and let us know what you think.  We can’t wait to make Grouply even better for you … and us!