The election’s not over yet (well one is). If you’re experiencing post-election blues, are suffering from electoral map withdrawal symptoms, no worries, you can vote for Grouptivity! We’re running a bi-partisan campaign to win best Social Networking Application for the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards.
Vote for us, tell your friends to vote for us, tell people you barely know to vote for us - we’re not picky! Our campaign platform is to create the best content sharing application on the web, so you can e-mail a friend, post to your social networks, and see what your friends are sharing direct from your browser. Free!
MySpace is finally ready to launch its OpenSocial-based development platform. According to Mashable, developers can now submit applications for review and the first set of approved applications will be available to users on March 13! In January, I talked about MySpace and OpenSocial in my post Facebook Platform vs. OpenSocial. Although it was announced last November, Google’s OpenSocial partners are only starting to launch their platform initiatives with 3 large sites (MySpace, Google’s Orkut and Hi5) launching over the next month! MySpace’s Jim Benedetto did a great job at the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference outlining MySpace’s upcoming platform’s strategy.
I also mentioned that as a service provider to content providers, Grouptivity is about providing publishers with increased traffic through improved and widespread distribution. Social networks (like MySpace and Facebook) are ideal environments that can leverage online content sharing tools and services to help publishers reach a wider audience and allow users to consumer and share “social news”.
A growing number of content publishers, including both media companies and upstarts, are still trying to figure out their social networking strategy as part of their overall social media strategies! One of the things Grouptivity does is help publisher develop and deploy their “social news” strategy. By providing a real-world gauge of what content users are actually sharing, Grouptivity enables content publishers to get real-time visibility into who is sharing what. Deploying this capability, in the context of a social network like Facebook or MySpace, gives users the ability to actively or passively share news that is interesting to them and it gives publisher a platform for increasing distribution, readership, and traffic!
There is a big movement to make mainstream Web 2.0 technologies! I have seen dozens of articles recently talking about the main-streaming of Web 2.0. For example, Adweek points to research done by Avenue A/Razorfish that shows some “Web 2.0 staples” such as video sharing have gone mainstream. The article mentions that 17 percent of users shared bookmarks through social bookmarking sites. What was interesting was the fact that more mature Web 2.0 technologies have higher adoption: 85 percent used “most e-mailed/most popular stories” links, 60 percent personalized their home pages and nearly the same number of users subscribed to RSS feeds. Blogs also proved very popular with 61 percent of those surveyed saying they read blogs at least on a weekly basis.
What is interesting about Grouptivity is that we are taking a rather mainstream technology (“Email a Friend”) and moving it into the real of Web 2.0 as I pointed out in my post title Email a Friend 2.0. Grouptivity is doing this by building a “social network” around shared content (which is really what email a friend or forward to a friend is) by enabling community and discussion around each piece of content that a user shares, either privately (with a group of friends, family or co-workers) or publicly! The fact that more mature technologies have higher adoption rates, as the Adweek article points, definitely plays in our favor and Grouptivity users get the intuitive functionality of an “Email a Friend” button along with the rich sharing environment and other social media feature that Web 2.0 has to offer!
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!
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
As you’ve probably noticed we’ve put up a new website. Apart from the obvious graphical changes we’ve been working on refining our messaging. It’s always a little hard to do but increasingly so if there are no direct comparisons that one can point to. Very simply, we are trying to leverage an under used asset, “email a friend”. A tool used by the mass market, defined by us 8-80 years, which covers 3 generations (my daughter is 9 and my dad is 70, but 8-80 sounds better).
We’re taking that tool and incorporating some of the really nice web 2.0 features like bookmarking, discussion forums and RSS. As opposed to taking pure Web 2.0 technology and trying to get adoption in the mainstream market.
We’re going to be presenting at the AlwaysOn Conference on Dec 6th, stay tuned for more updates over the next few weeks.
This patent basically covers some of the core technology in the current Grouptivity product and focuses on effectively streamlining the email creation, routing and forwarding process from within the application.
Given that this is the first (and probably last) patent I’ll recieve, it’s special! We’ve been working on this project for a while so it’s nice to know that we have some IP protection around our technology and just before our launch too.
