These messages look for all the world like they come from you personally. I’ve emailed back to people who “sent” these messages; they’ve had no idea about them, and were in a panic how to stop it.

Why this thing isn’t against the law, I don’t know. It is despicable. Stay far, far away from Grouply.

What it does do is make more and more animosity, suspicion, and distrust of Grouply among the members and owners of closed non-public Yahoo groups.

Having so many savvy entrepreneurs thus gunning against Grouply automatically puts Grouply in a bad situation for any new Public Relations campaigns. With any possible re-direction changes in Grouply’s future strategy (even if they should rightly determine that giving up pirating of non-public groups is in their interest) they have already lost the kind of trust needed for the public to feel good about giving them all their personal access codes and passwords. Hence, the comparison with Ning is invalid.

“Grouply is under serious scrutiny (appalled scrutiny) by YahooGroups list owners for a wide variety of security and list violation reasons. (I know, I’m one of them and am involved in the discussions.)”… read more

What matters is are they growing and with happy customers?

We agree with Ning that the number of supported networks is a relevant metric and a key asset. About a year ago, it appears that Ning had 60,000 networks and about 100,000 unique visitors per month, and now they have about 230,000 networks and 1.6 million unique visitors per month (Source: Compete.com). So over a year’s time, their networks increased by 4x while their unique visitors increased by 16x. As Ning has proven, networks fuel fast user growth. We are seeing similar effects with Grouply.

Except along this key metric – the number of vertical social networks – a direct comparison between Grouply and Ning is probably not useful today as we are very different companies right now:

* We’re approaching the market very differently. Grouply is going after existing networks whereas Ning is starting new ones from scratch.
* We’ve raised only $1.3 million whereas Ning has raised much more.
* We’ve been at it for only a few months, whereas Ning has been around for much longer.

Let me respond to a few points raised in the comments:

1. The numbers in the chart represent actual vertical social networks on Grouply, not simply “names” of groups we know about or groups that have been told about Grouply. What this means is that if you are a member of the network and you are a Grouply user, then you can login to Grouply, read an interact with past messages, post new messages, and view profiles of and communicate with other network members who are on Grouply.

2. To say that a social network exists on Grouply means pretty much the same thing that it means on Ning — that there is at least one person (though in many cases there are many more) who is using the platform to access the network. Over time, a network effect typically kicks in, with existing users inviting more users, and the number of users grows. This is why the number of networks is a relevant metric – it drives user growth.

3. Yahoo Groups alone has over 8 million groups and 110 million active users. These are successful, “real” groups – not “tire kickers” – and most have been around for years. So far, Grouply has upgraded over 350,000 of these groups into modern social networks.

4. We are currently experiencing a rapid increase in our user base driven by the rapid rise in the number of vertical social networks on Grouply. Unfortunately, Compete’s numbers are not current or accurate. As they say on their site, “We have little data for grouply.com, so these are rough estimates.” In this case, Compete is significantly underreporting the number of unique visitors to Grouply each month.

So in summary, we believe that there is great opportunity in vertical social networks, with many valid approaches. We are a young company employing a unique approach where we are getting some good traction along one relevant metric. That said, we do have a lot of work ahead of us!

Thanks for your comments.

Mark Robins
Co-founder/CEO, Grouply

So traffic is cool, but if it can’t be converted, then it’s still just traffic, even it sticks around and forms the community, there’s tons of those online, don’t even need new software for it (though it helps sometimes).

The biggest question asked since the beginning of the web 2.0 social networking scene has and still is: What do we do with it now?

for anyone who wants to see the comparison between grouply and ning:

http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv

Grouply has 5K uniques; Ning has 1.6M unques. That’s a difference of about 300x.

I love it……………………….:)