I have been procrastinating writing about the new round of funding for Grou.ps, primarily since it had already been widely reported.  Then, Fred’s post from this morning prompted me to finally post about both the round, and the other critical news from Grou.ps, the open-sourcing of the platform.

Fred’s conclusion is:

So using the less is more mantra, someone should build just that, make
it drop dead simple, and then build the killer API that lets everyone
build on top of that. It may be that the big social nets are in the
best spot to do that. Or maybe not.

Emre Sokullu, the founder and CEO of Grou.ps, commented on Fred’s blog, pointing out that the needs of group members and owners differ, which is a good point and an area that Grou.ps focuses on intently.

Another thing that Grou.ps has made a huge leap in is the open-sourcing of the platform.  This goes beyond the killer API solution Fred offers and is a critical step for wider adoption of Grou.ps.  Some of the proceeds from the new round will go towards opening the whole system, which, according to Emre, will:

• Commoditize the Grou.ps platform, makes it the natural choice of all online community leaders
• Give Grou.ps the competitive advantage to hire the most talented and motivated people from the pool of open source contributors.
• Let everyone create their own modules, share it with the rest of the world
• Allow the team to rethink their framework and make it even more modular and easily extensible

Grou.ps is already getting a lot of comparisons to Ning as a competitor.  The open-sourcing should help it stay competitive on the technology front.

Congratulations to Emre and the team on the new funding.  I’m also excited to be collaborating with the Golden Horn Ventures team to make Grou.ps a winner in social groupware.