Transparent Change: Non-JavaScript Links

We have been receiving feedback that all the links on the private group pages are JavaScript links and therefore users cannot open them in new tabs if they are using a tabbed browser.  (If you have no idea what we are talking about, you might want to skip this post.)

We never really thought about this possibility when designing Group-O-Matic.   But we are always listening to users, and so in response, we have converted as many links as we can to non-JavaScript links.  That is, you can now open most links in new tabs.  We think this is especially useful when viewing a message board and opening a new tab to compose a private message.  There are still a few links that are JavaScript links: these mainly require a dialog box to continue such as when deleting items.

As always, we welcome your feedback. So don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment below.

New Page: Group-O-Matic Tour

It has been suggested to us that it would be good if there were more information about Group-O-Matic on our front page so that prospective group organizers could see what we offer them before starting a group. We agree! In response, we are pleased to announce our new Group-O-Matic Tour, which features screen shots and associated informational text. There is now a link to this page on our home page for those people not logged in. If you are logged in, we are still just showing the search form and links to your groups.

New Feature: Optional Subdomains

Recently, someone created a group at Group-O-Matic and posted this indirect feedback on a forum site that has come to our attention. What they essentially say is that the Group-O-Matic Web addresses for public group pages are hard to deal with if you are trying to remember them or type them into a Web browser’s address bar. We agree!

In response, we are pleased to announce that all groups can now create optional subdomains at groupomatic.com that will automatically forward to the appropriate public group pages. For example, if it’s not already taken, you could get yourgroupname.groupomatic.com, and if someone typed that into their Web brower’s address bar, it would go right to your group’s public-facing info page.

To use this optional subdomain feature, just click on ‘Change Group Settings’ under the ‘Organizer Control Panel’ section, and then look for where it says Subdomain. It’s that easy.  For reference and as far as we know, at the time of this blog post meetup.com does not offer this feature for groups.

As always, we welcome your feedback. So don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment below.

New Feature: Private Message Boards

Today we are pleased to announce that in response to your feedback we have added private message boards for all groups at Group-O-Matic. To access them, click on the links entitled “View Group Message Board” under the Control Panel section within your internal group pages.

We evaluated all the commercial and open-source message board products we could find, but, in the end, we decided to forgo all of them and just build the message boards ourselves. (Note: if you are looking for a decent comparison site, check out ForumMatrix.) We felt that we wanted to start with something as simple as possible to encourage use and adoption, and only add additional features as needed by members. This is really our philosophy on features in general. All the forum products we evaluated were just too complicated, in our opinion.

By contrast, we frequent the simply designed Hacker News forum, which we think works quite well, and so we decided to model our message boards off of it. The biggest difference from common message boards these days is that on our message board comments are “threaded.” That means if you reply to a comment in the middle of a topic, your reply will be seen right under it (and indented), as opposed to at the bottom of the topic, which we find confusing. Meetup.com uses the latter and more common “flat” system. (For reference, meetup.com appears to use the open-source product mvnForum for their message boards.)

Our message boards are also private, which means what you write will not be indexed by search engines and otherwise generally available to the public. By contrast, meetup.com message boards are public. We decided to make our message boards private because, unlike a general forum Web site like Slashdot, within your private groups we think there is an expectation of privacy. And we want to meet that expectation for you as best we can.

As always, we welcome your feedback. So don’t hesitate to contact us.

Thank You for a Great Launch

Thank you to everyone who checked out Group-O-Matic yesterday on our initial launch day. New groups were created world-wide, and we received a lot of useful feedback that we will be working on in the coming weeks and months.

Why We Don’t Charge Group Organizers

Unlike other sites such as meetup.com, we do not charge group organizers to have a group at Group-O-Matic. We believe this policy makes sense for a number of reasons.

First, some people just won’t become group organizers if they have to pay to create groups, even though they would like to create groups otherwise. Second, for some types of casual groups, most people just won’t pay to organize them, even though these groups would benefit from the structure an online group service provides. Third, many existing online group organizers would create more groups if they didn’t have to pay for each group.

Fourth, many groups take a long time to get started, especially when group organizers don’t know anyone with the particular shared interest, and as a result, group organizers often give up too soon because they feel they are paying for nothing. At Group-O-Matic, groups can just sit out there until they reach critical mass, for free. We even have a setting to notify group organizers after certain numbers of people have joined their groups.

Finally, in a fee-based system, the organizer potentially has too much control as there is some amount control that a paying member is just legitimately entitled to since they are paying for the service. By contrast, we allow multiple equal-authority organizers. We also encourage group scheduling of events, which allows for other group members (besides the organizer) to take more control over the group and help ensure quality events actually happen.

Initial Launch Announcement

Today we are officially launching Group-O-Matic at groupomatic.com.

Group-O-Matic is a free service that helps people form local groups of strangers and friends for events. Common group examples are book clubs, political groups, business networking groups, etc. Each group gets its own public web page at groupomatic.com where people can join. People find these pages through email invitations, web page badges, through searching groupomatic.com, or through searching major search engines. Group-O-Matic is both intended to give structure to existing groups as well as to help brand new groups form.

So what are you waiting for? Check it out!