We’re often asked how we came up with the idea for Grouply. As we approach a major upgrade of the Grouply service, I thought a little retrospective musing might be in order.

When we were developing the initial concept of Grouply, we drew upon our own frustrating experiences running and participating in online groups. We also conducted a number of focus groups and interviews with leaders and members of groups of all sorts – mothers clubs, alumni associations, elementary schools, book clubs, discussion groups, etc. Groups, we discovered, employ a variety of online tools to meet their needs – Evite to collect RSVPs, stand-alone websites to share information with prospective members, Google Calendar to show upcoming events, and many more. There was one common thread, however. Every group we talked to – every single one – used Yahoo! Groups or, to a lesser extent, Google Groups to communicate important information and to facilitate discussions among members.

Some of these groups had been around for years and had accumulated hundreds of members and thousands of messages in their archives. We quickly realized that it would be extremely difficult to convince owners of such groups to abandon all this and restart on Grouply.

That’s when it hit us! Instead of creating a system to replace their existing online groups, why not integrate with and improve their groups in place? The initial concept of Grouply was born!

Yahoo! Groups Strengths

The next step for us was to figure out what features to focus on first. With over 110 million users, Yahoo! Groups clearly provides value for a lot of people. In fact, Yahoo! Groups does some things quite well:

• Email interface encourages broad participation – Yahoo! Groups benefits from a dead-simple email interface. You can post content to your group by sending to a group email address, and you can read content via email if you like. So if you can use email, you can use Yahoo! Groups. The email interface has enabled groups such as Harry Potter for Grownups to a develop a highly engaged member base and archives of over 180,000 messages.
• Breadth of groups enables you to explore your interests – There are over 9 million Yahoo! Groups covering every conceivable topic. Yahoo! Groups is a good way to engage with others around the subjects you care about.

Yahoo! Groups Deficiencies

Of course, Yahoo! Groups isn’t perfect. The fact that so many groups cobble together third-party features such as Evite and Google Calendar is evidence that Yahoo! Groups does not offer a group solution that suits everyone. Here are some areas where Yahoo! Groups is lacking:

• No customization or expansion options – Community websites like Metal Web News want a single website with multiple tabs and pages that all reflect a professional, unique “look and feel”. However, Yahoo! Groups provides no capability to create and expand a customized website.
• Hard to search for and locate content – Each message posted to a Yahoo! Group appears as a simple, uncategorized block of text. Events, classified listings, announcements, and general discussion comments are initially indistinguishable, which limits your ability to quickly find what you are looking for. Instead, you must read each posting to determine its topic and relevance, which quickly becomes overwhelming.
• Limited ability to connect with others – Profile pages on Yahoo! Groups are static and usually empty, so the only way to learn anything about fellow group members is by reading their posts. Since only 10% of group members post, it is surprisingly difficult to get to know 90% of the members in your Yahoo! Groups.
• No monetization capability – Groups like the Iron Horse Mothers Club charge annual membership dues and run a number of fee-based events each year. Yahoo! Groups provides no e-commerce capabilities to help with this.
• Limited event management – The Kimiz Volleyballerz group uses Yahoo! Groups to discuss volleyball-related topics, but they use Meetup.com to collect RSVPs for games.

Over these last two years at Grouply, we have focused on fixing those areas where Yahoo! Groups falls short with the goal of developing a single offering that provides all that you need to run a successful online group.

In my next post, I’ll investigate how well social networking sites like Facebook meet the needs of real online groups.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Company.