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.

We’ve praised new hosted forum startup Tangler on a number of occasions – most recently calling it the bleeding edge in new discussion board/forum startups.

Apparently someone else likes it too. Someone in Turkey is willing to pay up to $1,500 to anyone who can “clone Tangler.” But don’t go too far – the listing also states “do not steal tangler.com images and do not violate copyrights. The clone should have the same functions, but the design should look different.”

Two bids have been placed already, one for just $1,000. Of course, building a scalable forum platform that allows syncronous and asyncronous messaging via a javascript interface may require more of an investment than $1,000 or so. But hey, why not try.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this. Someone tried to buy a Techmeme clone for just $500 in 2006, and a fresher listing shows a $300 request for the same thing.

To whoever wins the business – my recommendation is to ask for the money up front, because it’s very unlikely you’re going to have a happy customer when you hand over a week or two of work on your Tangler or TechMeme clone.

Update: See DRM for other cloning projects he found. eBay for $1,500. $1,000 for Digg. Twitter for $1,365.

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):

Australian startup Tangler has created a next generation forum product that allows real-time discussions to occur without page refreshes. Their forum product is both synchronous and asynchronous – meaning it competes as much with Meebo (web based chat) as it does with existing forum applications. Users can also easily embed rich media into the discussion.

We first wrote about Tangler in February 2006, when it was deep in a development. They’ve been quietly working with beta partners for the last six months, and recently opened their doors to allow anyone to create a new forum. Last week, the 1,000th forum was created on Tangler.

Tangler forums are also decentralized. Any discussion/forum can easily be embedded in a third party website or websites. The discussion occurs simultaneously on all instances of the forum. See here for an example of an embedded forum.

Examples of startups using Tangler as their forum include Weewar, Particls and Omnidrive.

See our recent coverage of Meebo Rooms as well. It is interesting to see web chat and forums colliding towards the same end product.
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Over the weekend I spoke to Martin Wells, the founder and CEO of a startup from Sydney, Australia called Tangler. I had a look at the application they have been developing for the last 18 months now which is an instant messaging and communication app that is based around a concept they call ‘instant grouping’.

Instant grouping means that any number of people can take part in conversations around topics of interest they find on the web or in other applications. The application allows users to subscribe to a group – which can then be linked to any number of blogs, websites, music files (in iTunes or other apps), a point on a map or anything else. The conversations are persistent so you don’t need to be there when other people are and the desktop application will notify you when something new happens in a group.

This alleviates the problem some have seen at the moment with instant messaging applications tied to blogs by making each group an actual destination where users can make comments and have conversations. Tangler does a good job of uniting people around a common interest and letting them take part in conversations. This is where instant messaging has been heading for a while now, but Tangler looks to have gotten it right.

The guys have been spending some time in the valley recently while they prepare the company and the product for a public launch. Tangler has been privately funded to date but Martin has indicated they have investment interest from the USA at the moment which they are considering.

Tangler are planning to open up the private beta in 2 months – in the interim you can register your interest in their product on their website. I am eagerly awaiting the launch since I have seen many attempts at trying to make communication around a topic or website on the web easier and it seems that these guys are approaching it the right way and doing it well.