Nexo, the social network for families, or small groups

January 30, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

nexologo.bmpNexo bills itself as the social network for families, or small groups.

What? Not another social network! Well, the thinking of co-founder Craig Jorasch is that there’s still need for one more. There’s no site on the Web, he argues, where you can slap together a private network for a few trusted contacts – family members or others — and do it EASILY.

demologo2.bmpNexo, of Palo Alto, launches at the Demo conference today. It has all the Web 2.0 technology you want (fully AJAXed), and lets you design your family page(s), upload videos, photos wherever you want, and integrate whatever other third-party widgets you want. If you make an update, such as an event time change, you can notify the group by email (each member can specify how often, if at all, they get notified by email. For example, they can be notified of every change separately, or just get once-a-day summary). You then click on the email go back to the site to see changes. This keeps the site part of your everyday work-flow.

When we searched for an easy group site last year for a private project, we were stumped. We chose a wiki product, but it wasn’t very easy to use for non-techies. We recently signed up at Nexo, and it was straight-forward. It is good for any small group — from families, to church groups, sports teams and hobby groups.

Soon, Nexo will incorporate a function where you can email your group an update, such as a message, or photo, and it will be reflected on the site (in other words, you never have to visit the site).

Lots of existing companies overlap with what Nexo is doing. The closest is Myfamily, of Provo, Utah, but it doesn’t provide as much flexibility in designing the look and feel of site, or let you add third party widgets. cozilogo.bmpAnother company is Seattle’s Cozi, which has focused narrowly on families, and has quite a few features (see demo here; Flash version recommended). Problem with Cozi is that it requires a software download, which takes it out of the “real simple” camp. It’s less about building a site than managing a family’s life. But if you’re a family and taking things seriously (and don’t mind downloading), Cozi is worth a look. It has raised $4.3 million, mostly from angels. Finally, there’s GetVendors, of Foster City, Calif., which focuses on sharing information about local services, helping a family manage a home construction project, for example. And while highly popular social networking Bebo allows you to connect with friends privately, it isn’t focused on coherent groups. Ning lets you create a site, but doesn’t offer the same workflow features for small groups. Finally, Yahoo Groups lets groups come together, but again offers little control over a site’s design (question: Does this matter? Don’t know). Nexo lets you upload photos or videos from around the Web, including from YouTube, for example. Yahoo is more rigid.

As for security, Nexo lets you give different degrees of access to members, allowing some full editing access, others limited non-editing access.

Nexo is the umpteenth social network to launch. But there are still 100 million groups in the U.S., says Jorasch and most of them are not automated at all. They’re still using email.

Nexo is free and without ads for now. Eventually, it will be advertising supported. But if people don’t want ads, they can choose to pay, Jorasch said.

It has angel backing, and has been at work for a year. Jorasch and co-founder Tom McGannon founded Octopus, a company that was backed by Redpoint among others, and took in $20 million before being sold during the Internet bust for about break-even. The two also founded Metropolis Software, which focused on software automation. That company was bought by Clarify.

(Question to readers: Should VentureBeat ban future stories on social networking companies? Is this overkill? Have you reached saturation point?)

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Depends on how you define Social Networking :-)

    We at mailspaces do the whole wiki/discussion group thing as well, but because we automatically tag and link all of a community's content, it's a lot more than just a glorified mailing list. You have the ability to to create an automatic community portal based on content, and break down the barriers between e-mail, wiki and RSS

    Not all Web 2.0 features are good. Ajax as a mainstay may not be as desirable as it sounds. While fine for many web users, there are many communities and community members who require a fully accessible community, which is "readable" in a text browser

    There's a lot of life left in the "community" dog yet. Last year was the "me" year, and so a lot of what passes for social networking, was glorified self-publishing.

    Communities stretch back past Usenet to bulletin boards, but they are still badly served. The changes made to Google and Yahoo Groups are hardly revolutionary, with much of each company's focus staying with individual user generated content.

    Perhaps it is time to split off "Community" from "Social Networking" - Who knows, maybe Time's Man on the Year next year will be "US"?
  • Andy
    Please don't ban social networking stories! Yes, there are probably way too many micro niche social networks out there, but as you have pointed out there still are specialized needs that are not being met by the big players.

    Articles like this help me to keep up with what's out there and what other people are working on. Keep it up.
  • Alan
    If you ban stories on sites that include social networking you will miss out on many of the interesting companies.

    Looking at Nexo, they appear to be more of a platform for building group web sites than a traditional social networking company. I loved how flexible it was to create the pages.

    Skip the myspace clones but keep it up with the sites that incorporate social networking into their offerings.
  • Matt,

    I'm confused by the statement "Ning doesn't have workflows for small groups".

    I'm not sure what that means, but on Ning, you can create a private or public group social network for free in a few clicks and customize it in any way you'd like.

    Your new social network has member profiles, photo sharing, and a discussion forum all customized for your family, friends, or community.

    To the extent that it can be both public or private, we've seen lots of families using the Ning platform.

    Thanks,
    Gina
  • Gina,

    By workflow, I meant the email correspondence feature, where an update gets sent to the group, and you can check the email and get taken to the site, etc...

    Have you since implemented such a feature?
  • reza
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  • Yes :-)
  • What you are seeing with these products (and our product AirSet (www.airset.com) - which by the way you hurt our feelings by not mentioning :-) - is not really the same as social networking in the vein of MySpace and that ilk. Those products are targeted at people in their teens and twenties trying to get a life, exhibiting oneself to the world to meet people and make friends or get a date. Once you get a life you find that not only do you know enough people but between work, friends, family, school, and little league it's a really hard to keep track of all these relationships. The product that nails helping this set of people out has not yet emerged (yahoo groups is clearly the most widely used tool but they haven't really focused on updating that service in a while and it doesn't let you integrate the various groups to which you might belong.) The need is there, it's now a race to see who can deliver the best solution.
  • "There's no site on the Web, he argues, where you can slap together a private network for a few trusted contacts - family members or others — and do it EASILY."

    Untrue. At least for moms groups. We've got 'em. :)
  • Genealogy, A family based on social network

    I am a regular visitor of your blog and always find something new at your site. I have come up with some new findings and want to share it with you.
    I just launched a family 2.0 social network, Kincafe- www.kincafe.com. and would like to invite you for the review of the service and provide feedback to andy@kincafe.com.

    Thanks
    Paul
  • car insurance estimates
    Nice website. Great online affiliate program. Thank you.
  • Another site is http://www.familyden.com. It is a family social network where you can easily and privately share videos and photos with your family.
  • Gus
    I don't see much new in Nexo. May be because it is easy ti use! So many social networks for families have been created. Most of them focus on the immediate family relatives. Some of them allow you to interact with non distant families. We have founded familyigloo.com where the focus is on getting local families connected in order to improve their social support. We have also developed a matching tool where you can look up families that share the same traits with you. The competition is tough.