Grou.ps launched its US beta today, with an improved UI.  Emre and team have been hard at work on getting the platform ready for this important milestone.  Grou.ps already has some 150K users and a great need identified with Web2.0 services proliferating without any glue to tie them together.  The US market should be a goldmine for them.

Both the TechCrunch and Venture Beat posts reporting the launch point out critical points:

Grou.ps benefits from being simple like Ning and Wetpaint, yet focused
on productivity like Google and Zoho. They present a simple free
solution for moderated online collaboration.

The idea is good: Right now, members of VentureBeat read RSS feeds from
other sites within Google Reader, Bloglines or another RSS reader
service, then chat about them together on a freestanding IM service.
Grou.ps would let you do it all at once, in one place.

Congratulations to the Grou.ps team, and their VC backers, GHV.