Alani Kuye
Phantom Data Systems Inc.
Norwalk CT

Lets take your 10 man team and ONLY focus on speed! If you do not have speed then your additional features mean nothing.

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.

congrulation Emre.

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.

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

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!!!!

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.

Hope we can reach some big milestones like Grou.ps in Marro.ws

Grou.ps, in which I am a happy angel investor, has just announced a new tranche of financing from Golden Horn Ventures to help fund its explosive growth. Grou.ps founder and CEO Emre Sokullu has been hitting all of his milestones……

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)

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.

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.

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,