Thoughts on Ning Exodus and GROU.PS, SocialGo, Spruz, Grouply & others | The Blog

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Thoughts on Ning Exodus and GROU.PS, SocialGo, Spruz, Grouply & others

Mon 05 Jul 2010 16:03:53 | 22 comments

After Ning's decision to discontinue their free networks, nowadays I've seen a lot of blog posts and tweets from community owners, questioning which free platform to go with. Many of them are comparing solutions such as GROU.PS, Grouply, Spruz, SocialGo, Webs and BuddyPress. As the founder and CEO of GROU.PS and an avid community manager myself (http://www.eylem20.org http://www.barcampistanbul.com http://www.socialbeans.org and of course; http://grou.ps/groudotps) I'll do something pretty unusual and join this conversation directly. Here I'll share with you what I think of and know about each of those do-it-yourself social networking players that are being widely mentioned.

Disclosure: You may think I am biased and you'd probably be right... But my only purpose here is to be sincere about the market conditions, give you some insight aside from technical speculation which you can probably find anywhere, and let you know where my company stands exactly. Yet I still recommend that you to look at more independent sources as well.

BuddyPress
BuddyPress is a fairly new project but it was created by the same good folks who created the most popular blogging platform, Wordpress. It is a software solution, so unlike hosted/cloud solutions, it requires you to have your own servers and run it from there, continually update and be careful about the conflicts that might occur with your patches and plugins. Which means it's for advanced users and it costs you money. If you are strictly looking for a hosted solution though, I'd recommend that you go with them. The other players are Elgg (which has also recently launched its own hosted solution) and Pligg (which I heard just a few days ago). I know some of the folks behind BuddyPress (at Automattic); they are very nice people and they have funding that makes the software a safe bet for the long-term viability of your community. They are much more experienced in online publishing than any of us, too, but the software is not as mature as that of more established players like Elgg and Pligg.

At GROU.PS, we are strong believers in the cloud (i.e. hosted solutions). Running stuff on your own servers costs not only money but time and effort. There's a longer learning curve as well. I'm an open-source addict, and I love how customizable BuddyPress and similar players can be because of their open-source nature. Actually, that's why GROU.PS started its own open-source initiative two years ago. But at the end of the day, we evaluated our resources and decided to stick with one thing—but do it so perfectly that we would deliver the best of both worlds. At GROU.PS, we have the vision to create an eco-system similar to -- or even broader than -- SalesForce's AppForce platform. Our Developer and Template Design platforms are early examples of that. Expect to see tighter integration and more opportunities to make money from your knowledge on the GROU.PS platform soon. Such an extensible cloud-based solution not only is much more practical but would solve many of the incompatibility and crash hassles that occur in the open-source world.

Spruz
[update: Spruz has brought new limits to its service, only 100 members allowed in the free package]
Spruz has done some pretty impressive stuff. It managed to sneak into the Ning network with a toolbar add-on called skysa, and then created its own alternative platform, which today is called Spruz (and looks like a quick and dirty hack), using the knowledge and expertise it gained from skysa to steal networks from Ning. This strategy gave it a huge boost over others in the importing process. Independent stats confirm that, too: Alexa shows stunning growth, and Compete and Quantcast indicate that GROU.PS and Spruz are the fastest-growing networks since Ning’s big announcement. This growth of Spruz is fascinating, considering that GROU.PS had already been Ning’s biggest competitor for a long while; showing the same growth as us as a new player is indeed a good job. Spruz remains the fourth player, though, right behind SocialGo.

I really dislike a few things about Spruz, though, and I should state them here:

1) The look and feel are pretty poor, although the templates are fairly customizable. I know that style is a subjective matter, but try it for yourself. Look and feel are critical to creating a sense of belonging within your online community. They are what makes your members feel at home. Otherwise, why not use Facebook Groups to start your own social network?

2) Spruz is new but is already starting to have technical issues. Scaling to thousands of social networks is not an easy job. We remember that from our early days in 2008. Scaling requires a lot of experience and investment.
3) A personal concern of mine is that some of its templates are exact copies from our library. Granted, some of those templates are open source, and imitation is OK to some extent—but copying our default template is not the friendliest thing you can do.
4) One thing that I recommend all community managers look at is the financial stability of the platform they choose. Hosting millions of networks is an expensive job. Spruz is secretive about its funding and corporate status. Choosing a platform is like choosing a business partner: you need some transparency.

5) In a blog post, Spruz declared that it would cut costs by removing unused communities and by not serving videos. Not serving videos or files and saving on bandwidth is understandable; bandwidth is expensive. But losing that functionality is serious. And removing unused communities is kind of a silly argument because that does not really cut many costs.

Apart from these points, I find Spruz' community management very successful. It seems very responsive to people who want to build their communities there.

[Spruz' response can be found in comments]

SocialGo
I first heard about SocialGo, I guess, in mid 2008. Their platform is noticeably different for those who are familiar Ning. You may consider this originality and hence a plus.They are surely spending the most money in between these companies for advertising. I even see their ads on GROU.PS. They invest a lot of money in Google Ads. They should be financially more secure compared to some of the other hosted DIY social network companies that I mention here; their investors include the founders of Eidos, a big video game success.

But the current results show that there's not much traction on SocialGo, people tend to use other platforms instead. A personal note, it never appealed to my tastes either. And perhaps the fact that almost every single thing in their admin panel is a premium feature must be annoying for the group founders.

Webs
Webs is a very old and pretty stable web site creation service. I know one of their founders and investors, they are pretty committed to what they do and they are right now one of the best web site creation services out there. However, DIY social networking is not their core; it's an after-thought. Their DIY social networking platform is built on top of their existing web site creation platform as a patch - and that shows in the product itself with very weak social graph features, no real benefits of friending/following etc. That's why DIY social networking sounds like a me-too thing that they've done to justify their valuation in the heydays of the social networking.

All the tweets and blog entries I come across show weak signs of interest into Webs. I think that's a result of the weak social graph features I've just mentioned. People, when they sign up, realize they're not on an online community but rather a web site creation service.

Grouply
Grouply has a special place for me. 3 years ago, when Grouply was about to launch, GROU.PS was already up and running, I was introduced to them by my advisor who told me that we might be doing something similar - probably concluding from our names. Anyways, I emailed back and forth with their founders, I always enjoy meeting the managers/founders of the competitive companies, compare notes and see what we can do together to create a healthy competition environment. At that time, GROU.PS was totally a 1 man show with a single advisor, I had no funding, I was just a 23 years old guy who left his homeland with the dream of creating the world's best online community in Silicon Valley - where the software dreams come true.

However probably this extremely idealistic character of mine made Grouply founders consider me as a potential hiring candidate rather than a competitive service provider - which I wasn't OK with of course. Months later they've launched a service which was pretty different than DIY social networking, it was an aggregator for Yahoo Group and Google Groups. But after receiving a huge number of spam complaints, it didn't take too long for them to change their product. Just last year, they came up with a DIY social networking offering, which is of course, in terms of product, years behind what we offer; as a result of starting being pretty late to the game.

I can see that Ning's decision pushed some community managers to try Grouply as well, but the traction doesn't seem large yet.

GROU.PS
According to all independent sources GROU.PS is today the largest competitor of Ning. And again, early results show that GROU.PS and Spruz have become the biggest winners of Ning's decision to kick off free networks (even though GROU.PS has no leverage such as skysa) But I think there's much to see in this area; so everything can change. What I can observe people create their networks to try the platforms but many haven't come to a final conclusion yet. And I think that makes sense. Platform choice is a very important decision and needs to be made carefully.
GROU.PS is a content agnostic platform that aims to monetize this space by an asymmetric business model. That means, unlike Ning, we won't sell software, that's not our plan, we will instead charge brands and advertisers. Asymmetric model works pretty well in Google, Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand, services like eBay, Amazon, Salesforce use a symmetric model (a la Ning) where they charge directly those who use their service.

We also believe in revenue share. We know you, as an organic content creator, usually are not motivated by money to create that content and get people around. But you'd love to see the benefits of your efforts and/or create a budget for your community. GROU.PS aims to do that (and already does it to a some extent) and cut a commission to pay the bills.

This kind of a business model requires us to be very careful about our costs and there comes our competitive advantages. GROU.PS' development team is pretty large yet it is based in Turkey. That allows us to create a great product at a much lower cost than our competitors. As for bandwidth costs (GROU.PS provides enormous amounts of bandwidth and storage space for its users) we have a stealth mode product that we will announce soon - and you'll see how we're able to keep the things going by some truly innovative methods. I think you should definitely keep those financial arguments in mind while choosing your platform of choice.

People usually criticize GROU.PS for not being stable and I understand that. Indeed we did have periods of time when the service was on and off and our early adopters showed great patience - which we really appreciate and will never forget (even in our pricing) But we gained so much experience at that time that I am proud to say, today we are operationally very very stable. As for the product stability, we're getting better at it too. While having a team based in Turkey is a competitive advantage in terms of cost management, it was also a drawback in terms of software engineering experience. Nobody can beat Silicon Valley's experience in software engineering. But we have an office in the heart of Silicon Valley too, and that helped our small team quickly gain the same experience as their peers in Silicon Valley and today we have a very talented/gifted team and software engineering methods that allow us to deliver you a very stable product. However, we still keep the beta tag in our logo, because our product is not at the place where it needs to be yet. Our product vision continues to drive us further and further, stay with us and you'll see some very cool stuff coming up. Of course, some rare instances of instabilities are possible due to continuous release and other agile methods that we follow - but we'll keep that very very low.

I think another thing that I need to discuss is funding. GROU.PS has done a lot with very little funding. But, although I'm not able to get into details yet, you should be confident that we're about to announce something soon that will give us a long runway to accomplish the big vision that I have very vaguely outlined here.

All in all GROU.PS is like Japanese cars. these are our baby steps, you see a great product, great innovation but you hear about some instabilities; but that's about to change; GROU.PS does not just keep innovating but is also creating a truly amazing product with superior stability than anybody else. We are committed to keep our business model asymmetric (which means free for our group founders) and innovate in terms of business as well.

Final Notes

Well I know that this post has been in favour of my company, but that's because I truly believe in everything I say here. I invite other CEOs/product managers to post their own thoughts in comments or as new blog posts and I promise to publish links to their posts from here - for the sake of objectivity and giving a very well deserved say to them too

I anticipate that Ning's decision to kick off their free networks will result in many international networks to leave. That will make Ning more US focused. But I believe, people, in time, will choose the best product in the market - no matter what, no matter where they are. Gina Bianchini, ex CEO of Ning (and a terrific person whom I had a chance to meet), once said in an interview that she believes Ning is gonna remain number 1 in this space because the network effects will speak and keep the status-quo - her examples were Facebook and Twitter's points of displacement. With all due respect, I don't agree with that. First, DIY social networks consist of networks that are isolated from each other, network effects take place within our micro social networks not through the entire network itself. Second, even though the network effects were to take place, don't forget that Friendster and MySpace were number one before Facebook took over the throne.

Like this article?
Please retweet, digg, delicious, Facebook and/or share this with your friends on Ning.

BONUS MATERIAL:

Feature by Feature Comparison Sheet

GROU.PS Growth Figures

We care about our communities. After observing a lot of education communities moving to our platform; we've decided to create 2 new templates for the education community. Here are the screenshots:

I really dislike a few things about Spruz, though, and I should state them here:

Apart from these points, I find Spruz' community management very successful. It seems very responsive to people who want to build their communities there.

I can see that Ning's decision pushed some community managers to try Grouply as well, but the traction doesn't seem large yet.

Final Notes

Like this article?
Please retweet, digg, delicious, Facebook and/or share this with your friends on Ning.

BONUS MATERIAL:

Feature by Feature Comparison Sheet

GROU.PS Growth Figures

We care about our communities. After observing a lot of education communities moving to our platform; we've decided to create 2 new templates for the education community. Here are the screenshots:

Comments

Cosimo 19 months ago

When I came across Grou.ps I was nicely surprised to see it is the interesting fruit of new and different people than Ning. As a matter of fact, I reviewed Grou.ps just by taking inspiration from the website itself: it is very worth using it and allows lots of people dealing with free platforms. In these times of budget cuts, schools can afford some creative freedom and smart tools, such as Grou.ps. Your compared platforms offer much more than my short (and amateur) post, but are quite useful. Thanks you very much.
.

Jay Roberts 19 months ago

I wanted to thank you for the mention, but I need to clear up some facts about Spruz that are a little misleading by your post or clearly you have not done enough research.

#1 Spruz has greater experience in providing Social websites than from your perspective having launched in Spruz in January of 2007 and is powered by a platform that was originally developed in 2002, thus making our technology one of the oldest yet less known platforms on the net

#2 Themes in our theme library are mostly contributions from 3rd party designers directly to our library, except for a hand full that were designed by us. Thus I am a little unclear on how we stole anything from you on the design front. You even indicate the themes you are using were open source and if we are using a theme similar to one you have, it clearly demonstrates how adaptive our Design Engine is.

#3 On our financial status, Spruz is completely bootstrapped and very clear about our revenue model, plus we are profitable and not leaving off investors. I have yet to find out how your revenue model works, or how much revenue you generate. This comes from of course my understanding of being within the market and knowing the costs with running a large platform. How are you going to sustain your business when Ning can’t? It is clear you are having issues with the performance problems encountered on your network because you give so much for free but don’t have the hardware or bandwidth to support it. There is only so much you can give away for free.

#4 Skysa was launched this year, so that was hardly the reason behind our growth but Skysa is a very strong product on its own that we hope to continue to focus on in the months and years to come

I want to thank you for extending your arm to welcome replies from companies you mentioned. We are in a very large space together and there is room for all of us to Grow and play nicely with each other.

Emre Sokullu 19 months ago

@Jay thanks for your comment, the post is updated with a link to this.
OK I'll be more clear in response to your 2nd point, take a look at our nux template, you have exactly the same, and nux is not open source. Apart from that, there are zillions of open source templates out there and the choice of templates among our platforms happens to be the same.
And as for your question in your 3rd point, we have a robust technical team that takes care of that, we'll be sharing more details on that in a couple of months. But yes we are willing to continue to provide the same amount of storage/bandwidth with the same, if no better, pricing.
Cheers,

Vicky 19 months ago

The fact that Spruz recently announced out of the blue that it will limit its free services, made loads of people to want to move away from it. Personally, I am very disappointed in Spruz. It is a platform with loads of features, but it took me days to master it, as it is much more complicated than Ning. It has not created a Ning importing tool either, despite the flowery promises.

What lured me to Spruz was the unlimited number of members and the up to 2GB storage space. Now that it has limited the members and the storage space up to 100 it's crap. And I did not appreciate that they stated in their forums many times that they "respect their members" and will not pull something similar to Ning, only for us to find out that after 2 months and when we finally started migrating our members, they played exactly the same trick on us.

Yeah, they claim it's Google's fault. Even if it is, you cannot be a serious business company making promises only not to deliver at the crucial moment. Plus, don't tell me that despite all the fat words on their "sustainable" financial model, it only took Google to remove its ads fro this great model to collapse. This is ridiculous.

So, the point is, that Spruz looks now terribly unreliable. They better find an alternative sponsor soon and remove their limitations from the free services asap, in order to prove they mean serious business and they are sustainable. If not, they'll lose reliability completely and the Ning refugees will move away as quickly as they joined.

Charles 19 months ago

Why does Grou.ps feel the need to run twitter bots which send spammy replies to anyone who mentions any of your competitors? Surely you're better than that!

Beddoe 16 months ago

I have experience creating HTML, CSS, & Drupal websites and most recently, Ning, Grouply, and Grou.ps websites. For the DIY Social site building, I like GROU.PS the best for their flexibility and ability to list events in sub groups, etc. The only downside to GROU.PS that I can see is it is terribly slow. For example, when I add an event, it takes up to 20 seconds. This negative response time will be a turn-off to members. What are the plans to address this? Thank you.

Rob 16 months ago

Beddoe, best of luck to you getting a response. Our group has been attempting to evaluate Grou.ps for a couple of weeks now and are unable to because it's emailing features appear to be non-funtional and/or greatly delayed. If Grou.ps was working correctly, we would choose it hands down. However, emails either get delayed for DAYS or never get delivered at all and the site is very slow as you indicate.
Posts to the support forums are met with simply 'be patient' rather than any indication of what the problem might be, what the fix might be more when it might be corrected.

It would seem that Grou.ps is running into some of the same scalability issues it assigns to its competitors.

Rob 16 months ago

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