We’ve all done it.  Found an amazing piece of content on the web, only to bookmark and then forget what we called it.  Copy and pasted the URL in an e-mail to send a friend, then lost the trail of the discussion in our overflowing e-mail box.

While content may be king on the social web, trying to keep track of it all and sharing with friends is no easy task.  As I’m writing this article, I just remembered something a friend e-mailed me that I want to include, and now I have to scroll through all the names in my e-mail to see if I can find it (hopefully hasn’t been deleted already, or relegated to my “Old Mail” box).

Which is why I’m trying to get everyone I know to start using the new Firefox add-on from Grouptivity.

To start, let’s look at the numbers.  In a recent study conducted by social scientist and viral marketing guru Dan Zarrella, he found that 80% of the people he surveyed use e-mail as their primary method of sharing content found on the web.  Surprisingly, this was evenly distributed across the board, from what he calls “High Reach Individual Sharers” to the average user.  So while there’s an increase in content sharing in individual social networks, the primary language of shared content continues to be e-mail.

But what if you could have the best of all worlds?  E-mail a friend direct from your browser, post to your favorite social networks like Facebook, Myspace and Delicious, and save the content in a folder that you can categorize when you bookmark, or search later using keywords.

Sounds perfect.   Additional and appreciated features include the ability to upload your e-mail addresses from all your address books like AOL and Gmail, and you can receive a notification when your friend opens your e-mail (now you’ll know if they really read that low-fat curry vegan recipe).

After all, the best web search engine is your own personal network of friends.

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!

When Facebook launched its f8 application platform it experienced a 37% increase in growth and the number of available application quickly grew to over 10,000 by the end of year. It is going to be interesting to watch MySpace’s OpenSocial platform roll out as far as the number of applications being developed and if they do indeed bring users back to the site.

Grouptivity users will notice that the home page or desktop has been redesigned to provide quick and easily access to your inbox as well as to recently emailed articles and other important or frequently used information.  We have also made it easier for users to search for content on and outside Grouptivity. Existing Grouptivity users can simply login in to access their Grouptivity desktop. If you are not a user yet, sign up for an account, its easy and best of all, its free!

A lot of users are aware that they can access (or share) the comment and discussion thread around any piece of content in their inbox using RSS! In case you haven’t noticed, at the bottom of each shared article in your Inbox, right below the list of replies there is a small RSS Feed icon at the bottom right hand corner of the page. Simply click on the RSS icon to open up a new new page with the entire discussion thread as a XML-based RSS feed.

Copy the url to this page and can add this url to their favorite RSS news reader and voila! For most, it’s as simple as clicking on the link. All of the new browsers have made it a lot easier to subscribe to RSS feeds. There are also many free online and desktop RSS news readers available to users. For online users, My Yahoo, Google RSS Reader, Bloglines and Newsgator online are some of the most popular readers. You can also download and install as browser add-ons or applications desktop-based readers. For more on the subject of readers, you can visit the Wikipedia.

The beauty of Grouptivity is that it marries content-driven revenue with content publishers. It does so by building on the existing syndication models and partnering with publishers to drive traffic to their sites and share in the revenue generated by traffic.  Syndication alone does not a partnership make, and without a relationship in place with content publishers, it isn’t really possible to share revenue. This reality can be summarized by two simple equations:

Syndication – Relationships = Traffic

Syndication + Relationships = Traffic + Revenue

	Content Syndication: RSS-based syndication has enabled instant distribution of content by publishers and equally important, the ability to make it “subscribable”.  Most, if not all, of the biggest publishers on the web offer content feeds including publications like CNN, USATODAY, BBC, ABCNews, CNET, Yahoo and many others. This is in addition to the literally hundreds of thousands of bloggers who use and publish feeds to distribute their content and keep themselves connected to their audience. So basically, the feeds (technology) is already in place to enable content syndication between partners, what is missing in a pure syndication model is the relationship.
	Building Publisher Relationships: Grouptivity builds on the syndication model by seeking relationships with Publishers. Publishers (both large and small) partner with Grouptivity directly or through our self-service publisher sign-up process to establish a relationship. Once this relationship in place, Grouptivity provide them with a new revenue source by sharing all the ad-generate revenue their content drivers through Grouptivity or iPond.com (Grouptivity’s public repository of shared content. Other benefits Grouptivity provides to publishers includes fresh repeat traffic and user analytics and statics based on the traffic their content generates.

In a way, Grouptivity represents an evolution of the “Email a Friend” button! Email a Friend/Tell a friend/Forward to a Friend functionality probably represents the earliest form of content sharing.  This functionality first appeared during the Web 1.0 era and fast become a best practice amount content providers (and marketers) and one of the first form of online viral marketing.

Even today, forwarding content to a friend continues to be a very popular activity.  News articles are the second most popular category of content that users forward. According to Sharpe Partners (Jan 2006),  56% of participants in a focus group attested to forwarding news articles to friends. (Jokes and cartoons were the number one category with 88% of respondents admitting to forwarding jokes or cartoons to friends or co-workers).  Health care and medical information came in third with 32%.

Grouptivity provides all of the same functionality found in the original “Email a Friend” but takes it to the next level! Webware’s Rafe Needleman does a great job of explaining how the company has redefine the “Email This” button.

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.

By marrying the Email a Friend function with a public repository of content and by creating a discussion community around content through its power set of tools and services aimed at publishers, you can definitely see how Grouptivity is putting the 2.0 in Email a Friend 2.0!

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

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.

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.