Social Network - GROUPSITE

Groupsite is what is referred to as a platform, which is meant to help in the formation of group websites. It was formerly known as collective, but has since been rebranded; it mainly focuses on collaborations, rather than on leisure-based interactions. Groupsite is what you might call a collaboration of communities that come together to make a common goal a reality. The way they have done this, is through borrowing from what is in existence, combining that which they need and adding a few innovations of their own. They call this “social collaboration”. One way to achieve this feat has been to take some necessary bits and pieces (features) from other social networking sites and from collaboration software sites and from online listservs and groups for This has already been attempted by other known competitors. Groupsite lets the user get information or data from other websites much quicker and you can move widgets about on your screen. It allows for ease in directly embedding videos, photos and other applications by the Groupsite managers. This is achieved simply by dragging and dropping. In spite of there being a multitude of other similar sites, users will find that Groupsite is unique in its quest to promote productivity. It has features such as file storage and a shared calendar feature which, when combined with media sharing helps a lot in substantiating their claim of productivity-geared social networking. Groupsite is geared primarily towards catering for groups, with the group and not the individual being the center of its focus. It has diverse members, such as book clubs, mothers’ groups and corporate intranets and is common with college groups. It caters mainly to groups that like to observe their privacy and as such, has only about 20% of its members who have public profiles. The site is as a by- product of collectiveX, which is the brainchild of the entrepreneur Clarence Wooten. He now claims to have over 100,000 groups registered under Groupsite. Wooten is the same entrepreneur who sold his startup, Verisign, seven months after its launch for 23 million dollars. As a business enterprise, its approach is tried and tested to produce desired financial returns. It sells advertising space against its free memberships and puts its premium features up for sale. For instance from 9$ a month, a groups admins can have ad removal and even the option to fix in their own adverts. Again, the admins get more control over the permissions, a 3-gigabyte storage capacity, statistics, domain mapping and customized branding options. It also entitles the admins to 128-bit security. Still on the business front, it can be said that the management, which is led by Wooten have a solid handle on the money making side of things given that the parent company collective x was mooted with a seed capital of only $1.25 million and there are already 17,000 groups actively using the site not to mention over 100,000 that are registered users. In addition, Groupsite as its own entity received $2million as seed funding on 12 January 2009. The site also has a very professional looking setup. According to Groupsite, they are also offering a GroupsitePro, an addition that they claim includes all of the features minus the ads (unless you wish to run your own ads) all for $600 per year. It is priced per seat and its target clientele include educational groups and non-profit organizations and is also targeted at business.