GROU.PS Breathes New Life Into Your Yahoo Communities
GROU.PS is a do-it-yourself social networking platform that allows people with similar affiliations or interests to come together in one place. The communities created are customizable and flexible according to the needs of the group.
The GROU.PS platform is used to create a wide variety of community sites, including online gaming forums, e-learning classrooms, fan clubs, charity fundraising campaigns, college alumni societies, and event planning portals. In short, any organization seeking to aggregate and organize people online can greatly improve its effectiveness, engagement and appeal by migrating to the GROU.PS platform.
They’ve been around for a while, but just recently announced a tool that will let Yahoo Groups administrators to sync up with GROU.PS. This allows you to stick a bunch of new features onto your existing Yahoo community like wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and even subgroups. The Yahoo group admin doesn’t have to shut down the existing Yahoo group. The GROU.PS functionality integrates closely with the existing infrastructure, adding modern-day social networking features to an otherwise boring platform.
GROU.PS makes it simple to manage your community from one single domain. ActivityRank Pipelines provide a point system that rewards users with additional privileges based on their content and other contributions to the community. Among these privileges are moderation, which takes some of the heat off of the administrator in keeping the community organized.
The startup hosts about 40,000 different social networks and is home to more than 2.5 million users. They have received over $2 million in funding at this point. They are also launching a subscription model where you can charge members a fee and GROU.PS takes a 50% cut.
GROU.PS faces stiff competition from Ning, which has about 40 million users and about 2 million social networks created. Giving old Yahoo Groups the ability to step into the current day might help GROU.PS get bigger a lot faster. Also, Ning has some ongoing issues with spam, which could be a side-effect of them becoming so large. GROU.PS definitely has a chance to steal away some of Ning’s shine if they play their cards right.
Category: Social Web | Tags: grou.ps, Ning, Social Networking, Yahoo
About the Author Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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its actually a good site, just not many people are on it (for me anyways)
By the way; I have seen exactly the same comment in some other blogs too. It looks like you slander.
I agree with you in some parts but you are enhancing a bit i think. I have moved from Ning to Grou.ps and doing well so far. The support is really good, you cannot see such a support in other platforms. They care about you and your community personally. This is really important for me, because when i tried to contact support in other platforms you just get a automatic reply from a bot.
I have an educational group and Grou.ps meets all my needs. Moreover I don't have to pay for all futures and it is not limited as all others. We have also a Yahoo group for online educator. We are also planning to move it to Grou.ps.
Agreed. Grou.ps sucks! All this time in BETA with nothing to show for it! Nothing but bugs, bugs and bugs. Total piece of shite!!!
Don't waste your time with GROU.ps. A great concept tragically flawed by extremely poor support. Support contact emails that bounce, support forum you have to join and wait to be accepted to use, no link to delete your group, bugs that the support forum shows have been there for years…it's a mess.
This whole grou.ps sucks all the way! 4 years in BETA and nothing changed – full of bugs, constant crashes, problems with spam in emails, adding pictures and videos, minimal help from the support – read the posts on the ’support’ forum and see for yourselves what problems constantly faced by users of this failed experiment: http://grou.ps/groudotps/talks/c0
Rahsheen, I belong to a couple of Ning groups but I don't really spend to much time interacting there. I'm curious if Yahoo! plans to incorporate MyBlogLog into GROU.PS or is MyBlogLog going away soon. Thanks for sharing the info.