GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration, has raised $1 million in an extended Series A round of funding from Golden Horn Ventures. The company previously raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Golden Horn in 2008.
GROU.PS currently has 1 million registered members and 40,000 social networks on the platform. The DIY social network is growing fast; the platform has grown from 200,000 users to 1 million members within a year.
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).
GROU.PS also recently added ActivityRank Pipelines, 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. And the social network is launching a subscription model that will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees charges).
But while the social network is growing, it is still having trouble gaining users in the U.S against the leader in the DIY space, Ning, which hit one million social networks recently. GROU.PS’ is mostly popular in Japan and Brazil.
Excellent. Congrats, Emre!
I participate with both of these two social network too. It is easy to build a personal to bigger social network with them.
For whatever reason, http://grou.ps/...ntroduction.php loads a blank page, regardless of browser.
Just checked, works fine with me.
If you are looking something similar that operates behind the firewall, then http://www.intland.com offers codeBeamer. It has wiki, document sharing, task management, forums, integration with version control systems and more.
Its working cool
Any examples of sites using the grou.ps platform? What are the primary differences between grou.ps and ning? Do grou.ps sites require a grou.ps ID (like Ning ID)?
http://grou.ps/pwo
http://grou.ps/zapem
I’m for GROU.PS and I would say:
* Revenue sharing and monetization opportunities
* Open source, extensible APIs, flexibility, grou.ps templates fully customizable (yes fully, you can access Smarty template engine)
* Ease of use (just c/o the wizard mode!)
* ActivityRank Pipelines! (point & reward)
good job, it make to easy to use
Thanks Leena
As a side note – 25% of our traffic is from US and our growth rate is obvious. So not much trouble gaining users in the US actually.
Cheers,
WAKE UP!
The reason they are not gaining ground in the US over Ning can be attributed to the size of their 5 man company and the slowness of their network.
I am a member of every DIY social community on the net. Using Ning on an everyday basis.
While Ning has turned a cold def ear to the network creators who create so many networks on their platform and failed to reconize what their network creators really want out of a social community website, they still know the most important things are speed, reliability and ease of use.
Grou.ps has failed to grasp this and will never be able to compete with Ning with 1.1 million! They really need to get out there and find alot more funding.
Do they have potential? Yes they do, BUT they cannot compete against 104 million+ that Ning is riding on.
Grou.ps still has alot of glitches and breakdowns. Their speed has increased but not enough to compete with Ning.
If someone would like to fund me for say $250 million dollars, I could create the perfect DIY social network!
This network would be portable, have videos, pictures, music, blogs with categories and sub categories, forums that function like phpbb, twitter integration, plug-ins/extensions like Joomla, premium services social network builders could choose from to ever increase the functionality of their social networks and much much more.
So who is with me?? Who knows where I can get that kind of funding? Let’s get this thing rolling so I can start building a development team today!!
comment with your email address or phone number so we can get in touch.
That’s why Yahoo should snap them up before Yahoo Groups dies out too.
Funny you say this. I think their whole platform/website is down.
Congrats to the Grou.ps team. I have been using and recommending grou.ps for a while.
Grou.ps is easy to setup and use.
I have also been hearing about grou.ps in the US more often lately.
Good job, keep up the good work.
Congrats Emre! You’re doing a great job…
Grou.ps is quite easy to use. However, I’m unsure if people already on Ning would switch. That would be interesting to know.
Groups is in a good way. Its vision will make DIY social networks more efficient for their creators.
Really excellent, congrats Emre
Hope we can reach some big milestones like Grou.ps in Marro.ws
I personally think that their features BLOW Ning’s out of the water. They have all of the snazy tools that Ning Creators have been screaming for. set up a simple test site over at grou.ps and the speed is indeed somewhat slow, however they have hit a homerun over every tool that Ning offers. Everything from a REAL Wiki to the message forums to groups to events…. Everything is much better on grou.ps
Sometimes I sit and scratchmy head wondering what it is th staff at Ning does all day… Don’t they have a few hundred employees? WTF are they all doing over there? Grou.ps was created by a very small team with little funding and their tools and modules are much better than Ning’s and SocialGo’s.
If Grou.ps can generate enough money and target UNITED STATES (Notice in their language editor that they only have English-GB) then I really think they could give Ning a run for their money – but until then, Ning is the big dawg – especially how they snaked and lied to their network creators.
I personally wish these guys the absolute best of luck.. somebody needs to be a great threat to Ning.
@Russell
True Ning has turned cold towards the NC’s and only offer speed and reliability over grou.ps.
Will grou.ps listen?? Can they increase there speed and reliability? Or? Will they end up in the dead pool someday.
Ning treats NC’s like their dirt. Does not listen and IMO when the money runs out they will die.
I wonder where they plan on getting revenue from when we all know Google ads will not save them.
Do they really think that they will survive when they can’t make a dime selling premium features, when they don’t even offer an export tool, white label features or source code access anymore???
@grou.ps
You have some serious competition coming from a site called spruz.com, don’t let them pass you by. They already beat you in speed and reliability.
Will you listen?? Will you stop whining about how there are only 4 of you and now 5?? Nobody cares! They only care about their networks. They want you to works your a$#es off and make your website better than Ning.
Everyone wants to leave Ning, but there is nowhere else to go!!!!
To clarify some points related to us: Good news – GROU.PS team has grown into 10 people in the last 2 months.
As for our services, it’s true we had hard times for a while, it was hard to scale at the beginning, but everything has been running pretty smoothly since then. We have more than 20 app, db servers most of them 2 dual processor, quad core machines; we have invested in our infrastructure a lot – all backed by S3. Give it a one more try and you should see.
Well, I gave it another try and your speed still sucks! Nothing has improved.
Lets take your 10 man team and ONLY focus on speed! If you do not have speed then your additional features mean nothing.
Here’s the problem Emre,
Prioritization is paramount///VERY important, considering you’re going against some really well funded heavyweights in Ning, Hivelive, Blogger, WordPress etc.
Your speed is more important than too many features. You don’t want to be a jack of all trades and master at none. The features you have right now are more than enough. Increase your speed and load times and THEN fine tune your features for stability and fix any existing bugs.
If you don’t follow these simple tenets, Grou.ps will end up in a dot com graveyard. Trust me on this one, I’ve been there.
Alani Kuye
Phantom Data Systems Inc.
Norwalk CT
I first tried grou.ps two years ago and I would say that those guys have done excellent job developing the groups platform. congrats to the team behind it.
Most of the traffic is coming from Gay Porn groups, the groups Ning kicked out. And by porn I mean hard porn guys
I wonder if investors knew this before they went for an extension.
The most popular groups are, fyi:
http://grou.ps/seksmelayu
http://grou.ps/tjsrudebits
http://grou.ps/club888
porn is everywhere,same group on Ning and Google’s Blogger: http://clubgay8...8.blogspot.com/
in U.S, if someone ask me, what am i from? i say turkey.
They ask me Grou.ps
congrulation Emre.
have you guys taken a look at http://www.webjam.com they seems easier and user friendly and all those things…
this is really getting as common as building a website – I wonder if the users/customers can actually make out what differentiates one from the others – the one good thing that stands out is that its ad-free till 3 GB which is good as you get an opportunity to offer a good experience till you grow and can justify paying the premium service but this is hardly a differentiation that can last.
congratulations grou.ps team! looking forward to see grou.ps in the most visited 1000 sites…