Rebuttal to Anti-Grouply Posting - 4 February 2008

Earlier today I learned of a negative posting about Grouply that has been circulating in several groups. This negative posting was originally sent in response to a posting about Grouply. Below are excerpts from the anti-Grouply posting, along with my responses. I’ve tried to keep my responses succinct, but further details and answers to other commonly asked questions about Grouply can be found here.

Although the conclusions that the author draws in his posting are, for the most part, factually incorrect, I will say that, as an owner of many groups myself, I can fully appreciate what prompted his reaction and tone. Grouply includes a number of features that make it easy for users to invite their fellow group members to join, and sometimes users get carried away – or understandably don’t coordinate with each other – which can result in lots of similar invitations getting sent out, sometimes to the same group. This can be infuriating for group owners and moderators who are trying to control the discussion and provide a useful service to group members.

Immediately upon learning of this issue today we took action to prevent users from over-inviting their fellow group members to use Grouply. Specifically, if a group has recently been told about Grouply, then group members will no longer be able to use Grouply to post another invitation to the group. Our hope is that this limitation will adequately address this issue, but we will continue to monitor the situation, and we will take further steps of necessary.

There are a few things you should know about Grouply and those of us involved with it. Our goal is to dramatically improve your experience with your existing online groups. We want you to love Grouply, and it does us absolutely no good to have group members or owners upset with us. Although it’s possible to imagine all sorts of bad things that Grouply could do with your group messages, your Yahoo password, and any personal information you provide, I can assure you that we will not do these things. Grouply will never spam you with ads, sell your email addresses, or misuse your group messages in any way. It’s not what we as founders set out to accomplish with Grouply, and it’s certainly not what our investors (including Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn) have bought into.

Grouply was recently featured on TechCrunch, a popular and highly regarded site that reviews promising technology startups.

We are constantly making improvements to Grouply in response to user feedback, and we’d love to get your input. If you have any additional questions or feedback about Grouply or if you’d like a demo, please feel free to contact me at mark@grouply.com. Thanks very much.

Regards,

Mark Robins
Co-founder/CEO, Grouply
http://www.linkedin.com/in/markrobins

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>”Grouply is Not Allowed Here, Read”

>HELLO EVERYONE,

>IT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION THAT THE POST
>CONCERNING “GROUPLY” IS GARBAGE & SPAM.

Fact: Any invitations you see to join Grouply were sent by Grouply users. Grouply does not generate any such messages on its own. That said, Grouply — like virtually all networking websites — does provide “sample text” to use in invitations. This explains why you may have seen similar looking messages.

>HERE’S THE TRUE INFO I HAVE BEEN GIVEN –
>The msg appended below is spam of the worst kind.
>Grouply is a social networking message aggregator building a monster
>database of personal information belonging to everyone who gets
>caught in its net.

Fact: The only personal data Grouply has in its database is information you choose to give to Grouply. If you want to share some details about yourself with your fellow group members – such as your favorite TV show, hobbies, or photos — you can enter that in Grouply and it will be displayed on your Grouply profile page. Grouply has been certified by TRUSTe, a leading advocate for consumer privacy on the internet.  More details are available here.

>Grouply is ‘free’, however we all know there’s no free lunch. It’s
>actively promoted for a reason — marketing information is worth a
>lot of money.

Fact: Grouply is supported by online advertising, just like Yahoo and many other websites. Grouply will never sell your information to anyone. More details are available here.

>It is the subject of many copyright infringement discussions.

Fact: Grouply is not in violation of any copyright laws. Grouply is basically an enhanced email service like Gmail, America Online, and Yahoo Mail. Like these email services, Grouply is in compliance with copyright laws and Yahoo’s TOS. More details are available here.

>As Grouply grows and the size of its database of personal information
>grows with it, it will be sold and along with it so will the personal
>information for anyone who has gotten involved.

Fact: You control whether or not to enter any personal information into Grouply and who can see it. We will never sell your personal information to anyone.

>Every post which is posted via Grouply carries a promotional .sig .

Fact: Yes, postings through Grouply come with a Grouply “signature”. In this respect, Grouply behaves just like Yahoo Mail and Gmail. But you don’t have to post group messages via Grouply. You are welcome to continue to post to your groups via email or the Yahoo Groups website if you want. Grouply is just another option.

>Grouply even sets web-beacon cookies -
>http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/W/Web_beacon.Html

Fact: Grouply does not use web beacons today, but we might in the future if enough users request features that web beacons could help enable. One example is a feature to synchronize “read/unread” message status between Grouply and your email inbox. We could use a web beacon (essentially an image embedded in an email) to detect whether you opened the email, which would then be an indication that you have “read” the message in the email. We could then reflect this “read” status on the Grouply website. So while it’s true that the term can sound scary, “web beacons” can actually be quite useful.

Cookies are different from web beacons. Cookies are small files stored on your computer that help simplify your user experience with web applications. Virtually all advanced web applications, including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Groups, use cookies. References on Yahoo’s use of cookies are available here and here. Grouply uses cookies to track that you are logged into Grouply so that you don’t have to re-login every time you visit a new page. This is a very standard and common usage of cookies.

>Kindly note that there is also a referral number in the link
>sent to your group: http://www.grouply.com/register.php?r=18089
>?r= identifies the referrer.

Fact: Virtually all advanced web applications use URL parameters like this. Grouply uses parameters like this to enable various features requested by users. For example, users sometimes like to know if their invitations to friends and fellow group members have been accepted. We use this “r” parameter to track this and present this information back to Grouply users.

>The ‘net is full of information about this company.
>Here’s a thread you might be interested in:
>http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/GroupManagersForum/message/25070

I agree, this is a very useful thread to review. My favorite posting – one of the last in the thread — was submitted by one of the group moderators: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/GroupManagersForum/message/25132. He concludes that Grouply is basically an advanced email service and that the concerns expressed about Grouply in the thread are unwarranted.

>SO - APPARENTLY THIS GROUPLY CRAP COMPILES YOUR INFO & SELLS IT ALONG
>W/ PUTTING COOKIES ON YOUR PC TO TRACK EVERYTHING YOU DO.

Fact: The only personal information that Grouply has is information that you choose to enter. Grouply will never sell your personal information. Grouply uses cookies in a manner that is identical to that used in virtually all other advanced web applications, including Yahoo Groups itself.