Grouptivity bloggers capture users, and turn them into community members

September 25, 2008 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

Grouptivity is one of several Web tools that lets you easily strip information from a Web site and share it with others. Now it’s stepping up its intimacy with you. It wants to help bloggers capture you when you grab information from the blogger’s site, by prompting you to become a “member” of the site.

All bloggers have to do is insert a line of code in their blog. For bloggers, it’s convenient, because it lets them create a community, or social network, on the fly. However, Grouptivity’s networking features are pretty basic, so they remain in the category of “useful.” They’re not going to help a blogger become another Facebook overnight.

You get the gist of it by looking at the flow of images below: First, you come along and hit the Grouptivity “share” button on the blogger’s site. This prompts you to choose who you are sending it to, and how you want to share it (email, for example). But if you want to do more than email, for example, add your own notations, Grouptivity prompts you to sign up as a member of the site. After you agree, if you share something with somebody, they become a “friend.” Grouptivity then shows you a feed of everything you’re sharing, and everything your friends are sharing (last screen below). Users can choose to make their sharing private, however.

Grouptivity, a privately held Palo Alto, Calif., company, is announcing the new feature at the PlugandPlay Expo today in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The sharing and networking activity is hosted on Grouptivity’s servers, but Grouptivity wants to run advertising by it all, and will split the proceeds with the bloggers. Hearst is apparently already using the tool on some of its newspapers.

Unfortunately, for us, Grouptivity requires another registration (and our readers at VentureBeat have already been forced to register on Disqus to comment, which itself was a drag for those readers who had already registered to use our Wordpress comment system; so the last thing we want to do is make them register one more time). However, Ankesh Kumar, chief executive of Grouptivity, says OpenID can be used, and that he will integrate the tool with Pluck, making it easier for people using those systems.

grouptivity screen