GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration is launching a new tool, ActivityRank Pipelines. The feature is a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings.
The moderators are able to activate the “ActivityRank” feature within their admin interface, which can rank users by how much content is submitted onto the network and by the type of content. For example, a blog focused network could give more points to the moderated blog entries than the contributed photos or links. The administrator then create roles for the group, such as Designer or Blog Moderator. A “Pipeline” can be set up, where the admin can define at what ranking a member is rewarded with what role.
Currently in other DIY social networks, like Ning and KickApps, you can give members administrative roles within a network but the decision is done manually by the lead admin and isn’t based on a ranking system. The GROU.PS feature is a useful way to create an incentive for members to create more content for a network, but it is more ideal for a large network with a good amount of content, like this medical GROU.PS network which has 10,000 members. Smaller networks just wouldn’t make use this feature.
GROU.PS’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, etc).
Currently the entire GROU.PS network has 800,000 active users, according to founder Emre Sokullu, which is an increase from the 200,000 active users it had a year ago. Venture backed, GROU.PS raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Golden Horn Ventures in July 2008. But it seems that the social network is having trouble gaining users in the U.S against the leader in the DIY space, Ning, which is growing at a rapid pace. GROU.PS’ users is most popular in Japan and Brazil.
I wonder what percentage of groups, or smaller social networks have sizes large enough to make use of this, as Leena points out.
The reason the are not gaining users in the U.S., is because their platform is to slow and still has some functionality issues.
I am curious why they add new features when they have yet to gain control over their platforms speed and reliability? They are in beta and have many issues with consistent functionality. Why not focus on that and bring in more goodies later?
I have networks running on almost every social network platform out there. I think Ning is by far the fastest and most reliable.
Lets not forget about SocialGo! They are making huge strides but struggle with speed issues as well. If they increase the speed of their networks, I see them giving Ning a run for their money!
IMO I don’t think UK based servers can give US based members the speed they need for their networks. US based servers could help them when trying to sway new and old members from Ning and other platforms to SocialGo.
Speed is always a critical component and should receive the highest priority when developing!
I believe visitors and members would except bugs and some sporadic functionality, if the platform was fast! On the other hand social platforms suffer when speed is slow but they have reliability.
JP
tweetjunction.com
According to Alexa, almost 30% of their traffic comes from USA. Which is still huge. And we don’t have any speed issues, they used to have a for a while but they’re fine now.
It’s showing ads and promotional links on all sites .
This is racist.
Why is it racist?
It’s a good idea. I expect community importance/weighting mechanisms for good members (hopefully not just very active members) to be a differentiating factor in community-focused sites.
Their logo is from Spore
Interesting!
GROU.PS is doing an awesome job. Ning pissed us off by closing their APIs and banning some widget providers. Now I moved all my networks to GROU.PS and I’m pretty happy with it. As for the other alternatives, neither they’re free like GROU.PS or Ning nor they have the same level of customizability or feature set. GROU.PS rocks! God bless them.
Are you someone, from Grou.ps?
Your comment doesn’t look natural.
it’s a really nice site i think because it just gave me what i want. nothing more, nothing less
) i have a group, a website @ grou.ps now and it’s working great. thanks guys and give us some more visuality pls it will be more fun to be @ grou.ps then 
)
Great to read something different than Twitter! Cool!
To be able to get an administrative role without someone’s permission is a great feature !! If i contribute more to the content of a website than the others, of course i deserve a better role even if an admin doesn’t want to make me moderator or sth. When i get better role, i feel myself to make more for content. Well done Grou.ps!
This is the first time, I have experienced an authorization-bot. It can be customizable also according to my preferences. Great job guys, I appreciate you all sincerely..
although they made a great start, they have a lot to do
but i think they will swiftly get higher ranks at DIY sector
P.S. they should start upgrading with polishing group templates
great idea and implementation.
with this feature groups will be more active i think.
Interesting. I’m wondering what their ActivityRank Pipelines tool can do.
Pipelines is a really good implementation. It will help to develop my group by itself. Also I am waiting for their new features, which are mentioned in support forum…
it’s so useful that we can connect and communicate with our co-workers in such an easy way. we want to see more groups in grou.ps
is it aloud to run adult networks on grou.ps?
I tried Groups, but they are sooo slow! Plus, video uploads don’t work half the time, not to mention a bunch of other things that don’t work properly.
It looked good at first, but once I started working on my site I soon realized I needed to look elsewhere. No one has all day to waste sitting around and waiting for a page to load. It’s ridiculous. I hope they improve and things work out well, but for me I just can’t set up a site on a platform that isn’t at all reliable.
Grou.ps breaking the believes of the users .It is showing the ads and promotional links at the footer on free the sites which are less than 3 GB too…The users may think that the grou.ps is breaking rules
I think grou.ps are struggling big time, most things on the platform don’t work.
I’ve never experienced such a bad platform, I know it’s still in beta, but it’s been months, nearly a full year and the problems it has seem to be getting from bad to worse.
They need a massive injection of money if it’s going to work and as any future.
The guys running it are a young I feel, just kids.
They keep adding new features and not concentrating the core issues.
Kids playing with a new toy ???