There have been many social networking creation sites around. I have personally tired ning.com, socialgo etc. Today I stumbled upon grou.ps. I liked its service and I am sharing it with you.
It was impressive from the beginning. The sign up process is one of the simplest I have seen. In a few simple steps you can get your own social network up and running in 15 mins. Your members can sign in using the Facebook connect feature, that is one of the most popular global identity platforms around. With the Facebook connect integrated your new users are prompted to invite more friends from their network to your own grou.ps network. So traffic and members can go viral with ease. There are other invite option like direct mailing and address book import too.
Look and Feel
- You have a host of themes and color schemes to choose form.
- But what sets this service apart is the fully customizable modules and ability to moderate different features.
- You have normal commenting and liking options as in Facebook. You can add multiple blogs and rss feeds. Even if you don’t have your blog you can create blog post right here.
- You can add photos, videos and discussions to the live stream.
- Finally I would like to mention the Wiki feature. You and your network can have jointly edited content like those on Wikipedia.
Custom domains
Not many would like urls like http://grou.ps/ursocialnetwork. If you have something like http://mysocialnetwork.mydomain.com on your mind then just change the CNAME records on your DNS provider.
Removing Ads, Monetization and Premium services
This service is free, so to cover the costs Grou.ps displays ads on your network. You may still prefer to stop the ads and run your own ads by paying around $10 a month. They have an uppercap on disk space usage. Once the disk quota is used up the revenue flows on to grou.ps. Extra space can be bought @$5 per 5GB
Me and three others got our social network site in 20 minutes - WOW
After working around for a while a few minor glitches did appear. For example some times the profile pics do not appear after you comment on friend’s updates or posts. In another instance I had the page loading for ever but these issues vanish on refreshing the page.
Grou.ps has now around 2 million users and its continues to grow every day. One million users have joined the sites in the past 6 months.
Popularity: 100% [?]
