Grouply 3.0

This is Grouply’s largest release to date, delivering important new features requested and designed with the help of Grouply users. Send your ideas for new features to feedback@grouply.com.

Grouply Social
Grouply Social provides a set of advanced features that transforms your existing email lists and online groups into vibrant social networks. Grouply Social includes:

• Grouply Smart Profileâ„¢ – Users can customize their own advanced profile pages to show their interests, personal history, and contact information. Grouply profiles are “smart”, updating automatically to reflect your friends list, your group memberships, and the conversations you’ve posted to, rated highly, bookmarked, or tagged.
• Grouply Playground – Each Smart Profileâ„¢ includes a “playground” area where you can share photos, videos, and “widgets” from popular sites like YouTube and Slide.
• Advanced Privacy Controls – You decide who can see your profile page and what they see when they get there. Keep your list of groups private if you like. Share your home address only with your friends and select groups. Share the list of conversations you found interesting with your fellow group members. Or don’t. It’s all up to you.
• Grouply Privacy Viewerâ„¢ – On your Grouply Smart Profileâ„¢, you can quickly audit your privacy settings by seeing what your profile looks from the point of view of a friend or a member of a specific group.
• Friends – Upload your address book to invite friends—even those with whom you don’t share a group—to link to your Smart Profileâ„¢. Accept or ignore friend requests. Share your friends list on your profile and find new friends by viewing other profiles.
• Advanced People Search – Quickly search for Grouply users and filter and sort the results by a variety of criteria. Control whether others can see your search listing and what they can do with it, such as send you a message, add you as a friend, or view your friends list.

Grouply Alerts
Many groups are high-volume marketplaces—buy/sell/swap groups, Freecycle groups, and job posting boards. Finding one or two items you’re interested in among the hundreds of new postings each day can be a daunting, to say the least, and we many of us give up without even trying. With Grouply Alerts, just tell Grouply what you’re looking for (e.g., a used couch or a VP of Marketing job), and you’ll receive a real-time email alert as soon as a new message is posted that matches your criteria. Now you can keep up without missing out!

Grouply for Freecycling
There are over four million members of Freecycle groups—local Yahoo Groups that promote the exchange of reusable goods in order to reduce waste and landfill. Grouply for Freecycling includes the following:

• Grouply Alerts – Get notified via email as soon as an item you’re looking is offered in any of your Freecycle groups!
• “Free Stuff” Message Type – The Free Stuff message type distinguishes items offered for free from items offered For Sale, general discussions, events, and other messages across your groups. When you post a Free Stuff item in Grouply, you are presented with a template that incorporates the posting guidelines of most Freecycle groups—the subject begins with OFFER and the user is prompted to include their town and a description of the item.
• “Mark as Taken” Button – When a Free Stuff item you posted is claimed, you can, with one click, update the item’s status in Grouply and automatically post a TAKEN reply to the group so members know the item is no longer available.
• Advanced Search – With Grouply, you can search across all your Freecycle groups at once, and you can use tags to find specific items by type. You can set up a Saved Search to help you quickly see a list of items that match your search criteria.

For more on Grouply for Freecycling, see http://blog.grouply.com/freecycling.

Advanced Event Management
Organizing and promoting events to your groups is easier than ever with Grouply. Grouply Advanced Event Management includes the following:

• Event Message Type – Now when you post an event to one of your groups you won’t accidentally leave out any important details. Events in Grouply include common fields such as location, date, time, and contact information. When you view an event in Grouply, the most critical information is highlighted, including an interactive map with driving directions to the event location!
• RSVPs – Event organizers can keep track of who’s coming and attendees can get excited about who else will be there!
• Event Calendar – Never miss a group event because it was lost in your message inbox! Grouply users can see all their events across all their groups in a single, convenient event calendar.

Usability Enhancements
Grouply offers a number of new features to help you keep up with your groups more efficiently.

• Email This – Every so often you come across a great posting that you want to share with someone else. Now you can use Grouply’s Email This button to send a copy to a friend with a single click.
• Hide Messages – Is your Recent Messages list cluttered with conversations you don’t care about but can’t seem to escape from? Now with a single click you can “hide” the conversation and any future comments from your Grouply Smart Digestâ„¢ and your various message lists in Grouply.
• Read/Unread Status – Previously, conversation titles in Grouply appeared in bold only if you had never viewed any message in the thread before. Now conversation titles are bold if there are any new comments you haven’t seen. Mouseover the blue comment bubble to find out how many comments are new to you!
• Tip of the Day – Check out the “Tip of the Day” box on the left side of your Home page for a quick tip on how to get the most out of Grouply.
• Group Logo – From any Group Home page, click Upload Logo to add the group’s official logo to Grouply. The logo will appear on the Group Home page, in your Group Newsletter, and in various other places in Grouply.

Grouply: Clean and Simple
We heard from our users that Grouply had so many useful features that sometimes the basics weren’t clear. There’s more to come, but here’s what we’ve done so far to make Grouply easier for you to use:

• Tab Labels – We’ve simplified the tab labels to match the pages they link to. So the My Grouply tab has been renamed to Home, Visit Groups is now Groups, Browse Messages is now Messages, and See People is now People. To get to a given page, just click the tab of the same name. Simple!
• Home Page – We simplified the Home page to emphasize your recent messages, group list, and saved searches.
• Groups Page – If you have more than 10 groups, the My Groups section defaults to a simple, condensed list that displays faster and that you can scan quickly to find the groups you’d like to visit next.
• Messages Page – We moved some of the “quick lists” to the Messages page from the Home page.
• My Profile Page – This new page lives under the My Profile tab and displays your new and improved Grouply Smart Profileâ„¢ (see Grouply Social above).
• Group Home Page – We updated the Group Home page to emphasize Recent Messages at the top, just like on your personal Home page. To get to the Group Home page for a specific group, just click the name of the group from anywhere in Grouply.
• Settings Page – We condensed this page and removed all extraneous text so it is much easier to find what you need fast.
• Grouply Smart Digestâ„¢ – We added buttons to the top of the Smart Digestâ„¢ so that with one click you can get to the online Smart Digestâ„¢, change your Smart Digestâ„¢ subscription settings, and find tutorials. We also added a link to the Smart Digestâ„¢ in Grouply under the Home tab.
• Quick Start Wizard – When you first register with Grouply, you are presented with a series of steps called the Quick Start to get you up and running quickly. Now Grouply walks you through these steps one at a time using a convenient “wizard”.