Product

Reading Messages
Posting Messages
Adding Friends
Connecting Groups to Grouply: Email Connect and Web Connect

Online groups like email lists, bulletin boards, and forums are the original online social networks. Unfortunately, they haven’t evolved with the times, and today we find that they are as time consuming as ever to use and lack the social features that have made newer sites like Facebook and MySpace so engaging.

Grouply is a free service that provides you a better way to keep up and interact with your existing online groups. Each day you receive a Smart Digest™ that includes all the messages across all your groups, highlighting what’s interesting to you and hiding what’s not. On the Grouply website you can search across all your groups at once and see a cross-group event calendar and other interesting summaries. Grouply adds a social layer that helps group members get to know each other better, discover the most popular conversations, and build the community within the group.

This page provides a quick overview of the Grouply product and how it works. Click here to find out more by taking a tour, viewing a tutorial, or logging into Grouply as a test user!

Reading Messages

Grouply offers you a variety of ways to read and interact with messages posted to your groups. Are you interested in receiving messages via email? You can receive each message as an individual email, or you can subscribe to the Grouply Smart Digest™, an intelligent, personalized summary of all your group messages from the last day. Make your selections on the Manage Email Subscriptions page.

Of course, you can always login to the Grouply website to read messages there. The Grouply website provides you a number of fun ways to find messages of interest. Click See Recent Msgs at any time to see a list of the most recent messages across all your groups. In addition, you can browse for messages by type (e.g., event, for sale ad), by popularity (e.g., most viewed, most comments, most bookmarked, highest rated), by topic (tag), or by date. You can browse within a group or across all groups. Check out a fellow group member’s profile page and see what they have posted or found interesting. Or search for a specific message by keyword or other criteria.

Each message is displayed with all of the associated comments in a familiar blog-like layout, and the entire conversation is presented on its own easy-to-read web page. There you can review the view history, bookmark history, average rating, and tags to see who else found the conversation interesting. And you can rate, tag, or bookmark the conversation yourself or post your own comment.

Posting Messages

After you start using Grouply, you can, of course, continue to post messages to your groups via email as before. Many Grouply users, however, prefer to post messages from within the Grouply website. Click Post a Msg from any page, and choose from among several templates designed to support the most common types of messages.

Each template includes all the pertinent fields for the type of message you are posting. For example, the Event template includes fields for location, day, and start-time. The For Sale template includes a field for price. So no more reading and re-reading your message before sending, worried that you’re forgetting to include some key piece of information, and then reposting after you realize you did! Posting via Grouply is faster, more reliable, less error-prone, and way more fun!

Adding Friends

As more of your fellow group members use Grouply, your Grouply experience improves. Messages get categorized better, and it will be clear which messages are most popular and who’s reading what. When you’re ready, click Add Friends to tell your fellow group members about Grouply so they can enjoy all the benefits, too!

Connecting Groups to Grouply: Email Connect and Web Connect

Grouply aggregates all of your messages across all of your online groups into a single, easy-to-use website. Currently Grouply works with Yahoo Groups, and more systems will be supported in the future. Grouply works like an online email service such as Gmail, AIM Mail, and inbox.com. Most email services treat all email messages the same, but Grouply is specially designed for reading and interacting with messages from online groups like Yahoo Groups!

As a Yahoo Groups user, you have several options for accessing your group messages. You can read them directly on the Yahoo Groups website; you can have them delivered to an email application (e.g., Microsoft Outlook) on your computer; or you can read them on another website such as Gmail, America Online, or Grouply.

Online email services like Gmail and AIM Mail collect your group messages through email forwarding. You configure Yahoo Groups to send your group messages to your Gmail address, for example, and then you login to the Gmail website to read your messages there. Grouply can collect your group messages the same way using an option we call Email Connect. With Email Connect, Grouply provides you a grouply.com email address (e.g., jsmith@grouply.com) and updates your Yahoo Groups settings to send your group messages to that address.

Grouply also offers another option called called Web Connect. With Web Connect, your Yahoo Groups settings remain unchanged, and Grouply collects your group messages directly from the Yahoo Groups website.

Web Connect Default

If you signed up with Grouply before March 26, 2008, then all your groups were set to Email Connect by default when you registered. If you signed up more recently, then your groups were set to Web Connect when you registered. Regardless when you signed up, you can review and update your “connection type” at any time on the Update Group Access page in Grouply.

Choosing Email Connect or Web Connect

So which connection type is right for you? The short answer is that it doesn’t matter much which you choose. You get complete access to all Grouply features either way. The slight differences between Email and Web Connect are outlined in the table below, but here are the main tradeoffs:

• Web Connect - The main advantage is that it does not require any changes to your Yahoo Groups settings, while the main disadvantage is that it may take slightly longer for new postings to appear on the Grouply website.
• Email Connect - Your group messages appear almost immediately on the Grouply website. Your settings in Yahoo Groups display your grouply.com email address, so when you post a message, group members will see your grouply.com address in the “From” field. Note that if anyone sends an email to you at your grouply.com address, you will receive it, as it will be routed to the primary email address you listed on the Manage Email Addresses page in Grouply.