The Grouptivity extension for Firefox allows you to share and discuss any web page or article by simply click on the Email+ button in your browser! Visit the iPond.com site to download and install the the extension. Once you have installed the extension, you will notice that that two new button have been added to your toolbar. Now you are ready to share or save links to interest articles or other content you find online!

Additionally, Grouptivity has built-in integration for a growing list of websites that simply replaces their “Email a friend” or “Email this” button! This list of websites includes: New York Times, Yahoo! News, Fox News, BBC, MSNBC, CNN Money, Guardian (UK), News.com.au, Forbes, Washington Post, and Reuters. We’ll update you as we add more websites to this list.

You can also access the Email+ and bookmarking capabilities from your contextual menu by simply right-mouse clicking on a web page!

You can download the extension and read its instructions on the iPond.com site. Check it out today and start sharing content the smart way!

Some of you have noticed that we have started using the Grouptivity WordPress Plugin on our blog.  We have a set of end-user and blogger tools that allow content consumer and content providers share content quickly and easily.  The Grouptivity Email+ WordPress Plugin allows you to enable content sharing directly on their blog! The plugin is the ultimate free “email this” plugin for driving word of mouth traffic and encouraging content sharing!

Visit the WordPress plugin directory for more information on Email+, which summarizes how bloggers can benefit by installing Email+ on their blogs:

Grouptivity is a social content sharing and bookmarking plugin that offers three “must have” features: email this story, private discussions and forum, social bookmarking in one powerful, easy to use package. The Grouptivity powered button can be customized to deliver the following: Email This (with private discussions and forum), Bookmarking, and Cut and Paste with tracking and dashboard for your site

Grouptivity drives 3 times the traffic and ad monetization for bloggers. Your users become community members and bring their friends to your blog as they privately or publicly discuss your articles with their friends. They now have a single account to track all their emailed articles, bookmarks, discussions with friends

Yesterday I tried to illustrate how Grouptivity and iPond.com work together to provide increased traffic and monitization opportunities for content providers. iPond.com provides social content discovery into the user-generated content and information collected by Grouptivity-enabled “Email This” buttons and links embedded on publisher’s sites. iPond exposes this information throw a public “Digg-like” repository.

Webware’s Rafe Needleman does a pretty good job of describing iPond.com and its relation to Grouptivity:

Unlike other E-mail This buttons, the Grouptivity tool sends the story to a public repository, a Digg-like site called iPond. On this site, users can see what the most e-mailed items are from all of Grouptivity’s users. iPond also helps a bit with SEO for the sites that use it, since it’s a giant page of links that, hopefully, will get used by a lot of people.

Check iPond.com today to find out the hottest email content online. As I mentioned before in my post The Best Judge of Popularity: Email + Sharing, what people actually share with each other is probably the best judge of popularity!

I am big fan of infographics and wanted to share a diagram we use to demonstrate the “value chain” Grouptivity offers to publishers. The process really starts on the Publisher’s website, where Grouptivity enables content sharing and discussion. When readers interact with and share content on the publisher’s site, they continue the Grouptivity Discussion (either publicly or privately) on a private-labeled or co-branded version of the publisher’s site. A subset of the discussion and other user-generated content generated as part of the user-interaction drives is exposed and used to drive Social Content Discovery on the iPond.com consumer site. By exposing this user-generated content to search and syndication engines via the iPond site, Grouptivity provides publisher with a SEO advantage and drives traffic back to their site via backlinks, search results, syndication and other vehicles.

Yesterday, Webware’s Rafe Needleman compared Grouptivity to “Digg for E-mail” and today Mashable’s Kristen Nicole just posted a piece titled Email Becomes a “Digg” Network with Grouptivity’s iPond. Kristen starts by stating a very important point that publishers sometimes overlook:

Nearly every online publication (and social media, for that matter) has an “email this” option for its content. And considering that email is the most common form of communication on the web, it’s easy to see why emailing something to a friend is the easiest way to get them to look at something you’d think they’d find interesting.

Kristen also does a great job of complaining how iPond.com and Grouptivity work together to deliver value to publishers:

Grouptivity has positioned its new site, iPond, as a launching pad for publishers to further monetize their content, which looks a lot like a Digg for emailed content. From iPond you can see what’s “hot” and you can further discuss and bookmark content from there. The hope is to create an even more active community around emailed content.

A number of posts have come in response to Saul Hansell’s (New York Times) article titled Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network and Wall Street Journal’s Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again . AlwaysOn’s Brad Feld, for example, suggested that Microsoft may have a play by probing your Exchange server for social networking “data” in his post: Where is Microsoft In This Party? Others like Carmen Hughes (IgnitePR) see this as heralding the second coming of Email in her post: Is Email really Cool Again? Obvious because of what we do (allow users to share content via email and the web), we read these with some interest. Here are some of my observations, thoughts and predications on the subject of social networking and email:

• The idea isn’t a new one
  A number of companies have tried to use data in your inbox to create a social network. Spoke Software, Visible Path, and Plaxo are some “old names” you probably still recognize. Unfortunately, given their market focus and other factors, none have become a household name or gained any sizeable market share, just something to keep in mind.
• Data is not relationship
  Sure, social relationship “data” could potentially be gleamed by probing your email or even your exchange server. Other than the obvious security concerns, the idea that “he emails me, therefore he is my friend” doesn’t necessarily hold much water. With more and more “social networking” communication being done through the Web (or via other devices such as cellphone), looking only at email doesn’t give you a complete picture. Also, the WSJ article points out that most young people use the MySpace and Facebook inbox more than they use email.

Here is what I believe is more likely to happen:

• Social networks and email become better integrated
  True, social networks already have an inbox, but one can envision better integration between email and social networks. The WSJ article points to some great features Yahoo! is experimenting with such as profile info within your email and a “friend finder” based on email communications.

• Social networks will become email providers
  It isn’t very difficult to turn your social networking inbox into a full-blown email client. Sure you’ll need a couple extra thousand servers to handle a load, but companies like Facebook and MySpace can easily afford it. All they have to do is give users an email address they can use (john@user.myspace.com or sam@facebook.net). Ironically, perhaps email, not social networking, is the feature.

• You wont’ win the social networking war with an email client!
  Its always fun to get excited about second comings but the hype is probably going to die down soon. What do Yahoo!, Google and MSN have in common? Social-networking envy. None of the them have a thriving social network of their own (yet). Sure you can improve your offering by integrated social networking features with your traffic-leading product (email) but its probably not going to win the social networking war.

Webware’s Rafe Needleman did a great piece titled Grouptivity Trying to Build ‘Digg for E-Mail’, where he talks about how the company is trying to redefine the “Email This” button.

Rafe writes:

Unlike other E-mail This buttons, the Grouptivity tool sends the story to a public repository, a Digg-like site called iPond. On this site, users can see what the most e-mailed items are from all of Grouptivity’s users. iPond also helps a bit with SEO for the sites that use it, since it’s a giant page of links that, hopefully, will get used by a lot of people.

and ends by saying:

Kumar says that the users on the New York Times’ site send 50,000 “E-mail this” articles a day. If that’s accurate, adding some new functionality to this operation makes a lot of sense

The best measure of a content’s popularity should be the number of people that actually share it with another human being!  In today “Spam–conscious” email environment, the act of emailing a link to a friend or associated is a great litmus test of whether you think its worthy of being looked at! After all, you don’t want to end up on someone’s black-list or worse their white-list.

True, most social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, base popularity on the number of times a piece of content has been bookmarked, but considering there is no real penalty or stigma associated with “reckless” bookmarking, is this really a good gauge of popularity?

Bookmarking-based Popularity: Is Social Bookmarking Democratic?
The influential Graywolf SEO Blog points to the fact that in reality, Digg power users control the homepage, not the democratic popular vote. According to seomoz.org “of all stories that make it to the front page of Digg, more than 20% come from a select group of 20 users.” Social bookmarking is also more easily abused and increasing number of marketers and sites are simply using social bookmarking for self promotion. Although Grouptivity is not immune to all types of abuse, by marrying sharing with email, it definitely helps discourage some of it.

Sharing-based Popularity: A Step in the Right Direction!
Grouptivity’s measure of popularity is based on a personal actually desire to share a piece of content with a group of people (known to them). The initial invitation goes out via email but brings the recipient back to the article or post on the Grouptivity site where they can view, discuss or share it.

Contrast this with the way social bookmarking generally works, where popularity is based on a person’s (sometimes anonymous) desire to share piece of content with the “world”.

Do You Really Know Me? – Adding Personal Context
If you find yourself on Digg or Delicious, you are probably looking at articles and content that has been rated by people you don’t known and who don’t you. One of the goals of Grouptivity to add a personal context to sharing – by assuming that your friends, co-workers and acquaintances probably know something about what you are interested in and enabling them to share content with you and either publicly or privately discuss that shared content.

Ankesh Kumar, our President and CEO, is presenting this Thursday (December 6) at the Venture Summit West 2007 even in Half Moon Bay. You can catch Ankesh’s presentation as part of the Consumer and Media CEO Presentations at 3:30pm in the Salon III conference room (right after the afternoon break). Immediately following this session, all the presenters will be available for 30-minutes of Q&A and demos in the Lobby.

Alex Iskold in his post “Long Tail of the Blogosphere” makes an insightful comment that “You can make money on the long tail but not in the long tail” that I touched on in my previous post on “Publisher-Centric Content Sharing”.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “long tail” has become an increasingly popular, especially in the Blogosphere! The idea behind the long tail is actually a simple one. The phrase was originally coined by Wired’s Chris Anderson in 2004 as a statistics concept used to refer to the idea that collectively, things that are in rather low demand can amount to quite large volumes.

Squidoo describes it in the following way:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

In the content publishing world, the long tails represents the aggregate of all the small or “niche” content publishers and bloggers.  If if this chart represents the distribution of content publisher traffic, there green area (“Head”) represents the aggregate “bulk” of high volue traffic to a small handful of popular sites, while the yellow area represents the Long Tail shared accross a large number of smaller publishers. Those interested in more information on the long tail should check out Chris Anderson’s Long Tail 101.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Grouptivity is about helping monetize the long tail. For smaller content publishers, we do that in three different ways:

• We expose and promote your content to generate extra traffic
  By allowing users to share content on publisher’s sites and then exposing that “user-generated” content to the community at large, Grouptivity sends traffic back to publisher’s sites.
  


• We build a community around content to increase page views
  By building a discussion community around the content your readers have shared, Grouptivity increases the number of page views and then shares the resulting ad revenue with the publisher.
  


• We increase the “viral” spread of publisher’s content
  By providing a robust set of sharing and rating tools (including browser add-ons, blogging plug-ins and widgets), Grouptivity accelerates sharing of content via email, social bookmarking and other forms of syndication (RSS, i.e.).

Given the revenue generating challenges facing publishers in the long tail, we feel a multiple prong strategy to traffic and revenue generation is the best one. I will share the highlights from our upcoming presentation at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit West event in future posts for those interested in long trail revenue generating strategies.