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 .

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.

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!

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!

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!