Grouply

Grouply is a free online service that, like Ning, provides specialized (vertical) social networks. Examples of vertical social networks on Grouply include alumni associations, professional organizations, mothers clubs, and youth sports teams. Ning provides users the ability to create new vertical social networks from scratch. Grouply, on the other hand, transforms existing email lists and groups on Yahoo Groups and similar systems into vertical social networks.

Grouply originally offered features to help users save time in keeping up with their online groups. For example, Grouply aggregated messages from all of a user's Yahoo Groups into a single website and provided users with a personalized email (called a "smart digest") that summarized group activity.

In January 2008, Grouply launched Grouply Social, a collection of features found on traditional social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Grouply Social gave users the ability to create advanced "profile pages" that included contact information, photos, and "widgets" from sites like YouTube and Slide. Grouply Social also provided Grouply users the ability to connect to each other as "friends" and to selectively expose profile information to some users and not others.

In May 2008, Grouply claimed to have surpassed Ning in the number of vertical social networks available on its platform.

Recent enhancements
The following improvements were made to Grouply in response to user feedback:

* Grouply Social Inbox - Grouply users do not need to provide Grouply with their username and password to Yahoo (or any supported group system) to use Grouply.

* Web Connect - Grouply collects group messages directly from the Yahoo Groups website instead of via email. New Grouply users are now connected to their group via Web Connect by default, so the user's Yahoo Groups settings do not change when he registers with Grouply.

* Grouply Owner Controls - A group's owner can control whether invitations to Grouply can be posted to the group. The owner can also completely block the group from being accessed through Grouply.

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