Adam Penenberg of Fast Company got lots of well-deserved grief for his cover article about Ning last month, the one that focused on the Andreessen and Bianchini duo’s “viral expansion loops”.

The overly simple idea behind those loops is this: members join a service and then invite their friends. Rinse and repeat, and you’ve got exponential growth rates.

Things aren’t quite so simple and straightforward (factors like stickiness come into play), but there is a good deal of truth to the idea that users beget users, especially when a mass of them holds a certain value (the so-called “network effect”). So it would come as no surprise if one of Ning’s competitors decided to claim even stronger viral expansion loops.

Grouply, a broad social network divided into groups that are built on top of those found at Yahoo, is making such a claim. Assuming the concepts of groups and networks are tantamount, Grouply claims to have passed Ning, last reported to have 230,000+ networks, with its 300,000+ groups (see chart below). And Grouply is owing its success to the symbiotic (or parasitic?) relationship it has established with Yahoo.

When Grouply started off, it was mainly a tool for members of multiple Yahoo groups to keep track of their activities. It then evolved into a more distinct social networking platform by expanding the ways in which members could interact onsite, thereby bringing it into closer competition with Ning. But while networks on Ning are built from scratch, groups on Grouply must be identified from the start with groups on Yahoo.

This is a double-edged sword to growth. On the one hand, non-Yahoo users will fail to find Grouply as an appealing place to start their niche networks. But Yahoo groups users will find it exceedingly appealing to do so, and it’s that special appeal that boosts Grouply’s adoption rate.

During the Grouply setup process, members of a particular Yahoo group can be sent invites to the new Grouply group (a practice that has led many to accuse Grouply of spamming). Regardless of how enthusiastically Grouply users actually push their new creations, they benefit from the previously formed communities on Yahoo because they can invite members over to the new and improved party. Such well-targeted invitations are why Grouply can assert that it possesses superior viral expansion loops.

So great, Grouply claims to have one-uped Ning. But there’s still a concern over the actual quality of these networks and groups. How many people belong to them on average? How active are their users? How long do those users actually stick around? And what are they up to? No one really knows, outside of the companies themselves. What I’d like to see are companies divulging great levels of detail regarding their usage statistics. That way we can truly gauge the relative success of these social platforms, the proliferation of which continues every day.

• Sphere It
• 

Grouply is a startup trying to improve the online “groups” systems (Yahoo/Google Groups) currently used by over 100 million registered users. Their first goal was to create a simple management tool for easily tracking updates across your groups on the two networks. You give Grouply your account credentials and they organize your accounts in a more convenient manner (see our earlier review). Their second goal, has been to bring those systems up to speed with the latest social networking enhancements.

The newly launched features are collectively called “Grouply Social” and include all the social networking features you’d expect. User profile pages show your interests, personal history, and contact information. The pages also support multimedia like most social networks, allowing users to share photos, videos, and “widgets” from sites like YouTube and Slide. Members can also befriend each other, with full privacy controls. You can decide who has access to your profile and what portions they can see, similar to Facebook.

The rest of the internet is clearly blowing past these older “groups” services when it comes to usability and engagement. Sites like Tangler, Wetpaint, and Klostu are creating whole new systems to bring online forums up to speed. As we’ve said before, Grouply is taking an evolutionary approach by absorbing users and data from existing systems and enhancing their functionality. Grouply recently raised over $1.3 million.

• Sphere It
• 

Online discussion aggregator and management service Grouply has taken $1.3 million in funding from Reid Hoffman, SoftTech VC, Harvard Angels, and Western Technology Investment.

Grouply offers a centralized discussion platform that allows users to track and manage their discussions on sites such as Google Groups (coming soon) and Yahoo Groups.

To quote Nick from our November 2007 review:

Grouply, in effect, takes over your interface with the groups websites. You can carry out all your normal tasks from Yahoo Groups, but with an added management and social layer. Simply give it your credentials and Grouply starts tracking your conversations across your groups. Technically speaking, Grouply does this by substituting an @grouply email address for your email contact to start receiving group updates on your behalf. All your messages are collected into one main feed with several intelligent ways of sorting through them for information you care about. Messages are organized by group, threaded by conversation, rated, and tagged. Any ratings or tags users add to a messages are shared with other members. Each message thread is automatically put into one of five groups identified by icons: discussion, wanted, events, for sale, and news. They’re also organized into summary feeds and smart digest, which only show you updates for conversations you’ve shown some interest in by reading.

• Sphere It
• 

Before the days of vampire bites and “social advertising” there were online message boards. In 1999 eGroups had 17 million members when they sold to Yahoo for $432 million in stock. Now they have over 100 million members with an equally large volume of email traded back and forth. Add on top of that users with groups services from Google, AOL, MSN, and the independent forums (around a 300 million “boardscape”) and the numbers grow hundreds of millions more.

But these forums can be somewhat dated when compared to their modern social networking brethren or at the very least inconvenient when your interests span multiple domains. Managing your conversation across multiple boards can be a pain. Grouply, a startup that’s been flying relatively under the radar, aims to provide an easier way to manage your conversations across these groups and social features. They plan to expand to all online groups, but they’re starting with Yahoo and Google Groups. Klostu is another startup looking to simplify the long tail of message boards. Meetro is expected to launch their own simplified forum system as well.

Grouply, in effect, takes over your interface with the groups websites. You can carry out all your normal tasks from Yahoo Groups, but with an added management and social layer. Simply give it your credentials and Grouply starts tracking your conversations across your groups. Technically speaking, Grouply does this by substituting an @grouply email address for your email contact to start receiving group updates on your behalf. All your messages are collected into one main feed with several intelligent ways of sorting through them for information you care about. Messages are organized by group, threaded by conversation, rated, and tagged. Any ratings or tags users add to a messages are shared with other members. Each message thread is automatically put into one of five groups identified by icons: discussion, wanted, events, for sale, and news. They’re also organized into summary feeds and smart digest, which only show you updates for conversations you’ve shown some interest in by reading.

I can only imagine that Grouply is going through the trouble of improving upon Yahoo and Google Groups so that one day it becomes simply easier to use Grouply instead of the boards they manage. It’s kind of an evolutionary instead of revolutionary strategy.

• Sphere It
• 

Seattle-based Wetpaint, which launched in June 2006, is a hosted wiki site that focuses on great looking sites and making the user interface as easy as possible. A number of wikis have popped up around popular pop culture stuff, as well as more private sites.

Tonight they added new feature that should generate a lot of page views - they have fully integrated a forum/message board into every wiki.

This isn’t Tangler-level forums (which we consider to be the bleeding edge), but they’ve put a lot of thought into the feature set around these message boards. Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks.

CEO Ben Elowitz says the two products go together well - wikis are great for evergreen content but don’t allow for good conversation. Forums allow great conversation but aren’t great for new readers. The hope is that by combining them they’ll allow for better content for all users. And in the process get a lot of page views.

Other startups innovating in the forum space (besides Tangler, mentioned above) are Meetro and Grouply.

The hosted wiki space is crowded, and Wetpaint competes with Wikia and PBWiki, among others. Comscore shows Wikia in the lead with over 3 million monthly uniques, followed by Wetpaint with 1.3 million and PBWiki with 770k (Wikipedia, of course, is the 800 pound gorilla, with 228 million unique monthly visitors):

• Sphere It
• 

Angel investor and startup advisor Jeff Clavier (pictured with Digg founder Kevin Rose) just announced a new $12 million early stage venture fund today at the TechCrunch40 conference. The new fund will be called SoftTech VC II.

Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.

He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k - $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.

Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete.

• Sphere It
•