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.

Announcing Grouply Social Inbox™

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 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!

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 .

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.

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!

• 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!

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