O-M-Grouply!

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: 1: People need to actually do some research before flipping out. 2: People need to pay attention to what they're doing. 3: People need to read more carefully.

I recently got an invite from a friend on one of my Hellenic polytheist lists for a site called Grouply. Now, I must admit, when I first clicked the "accept" link and signed up, I did neither #'s 2 nor 3. This resulted in me clicking through the site, pretty tired, mind you, but fighting to stay awake cos the long distance and local toll calling wasn't working and I needed to tell my room-mate something important after he got home from work (and I don't always trust leaving a written message, since his cat shreds paper when he feels he's being ignored). Now, this resulted in me suddenly realising, about halfway through the sign-up-and-invite process that I had just sent a few dozen e-mails to people.

Notice that I said I sent those e-mails — cos that's what I did. It says right on the Invite pages that you, the user, are to select which groups' members to send invites to. All Grouply does is automate the process for you. If you want to skip that step, that is an option available to you, as well, but if you mis-click, do not blame the site.

What is SPAM?
Technically, by the loosest definition, electronic e-mail spam is any unsolicited e-mail arriving in your inbox — Facebook invites, Facebook application invites, MySpace updates, and so forth, technically, would follow under the loosest definition of "spam". Grouply, in that respect, isn't that different from my friend Alejandra sending me an invite to use Some Facebook Application™ — the only noticable difference is that Grouply has access to one's Yahoo!Groups subscriptions and can thus e-mail those groups in addition to individuals.

What is identity theft?
This is where I see so many misconceptions about what x-Internet phenomenon actually is that it makes me dry-heave at times. Or, well, I would if I wasn't so laid back. :-)

"Identity theft" is a very specific crime: It's when an individual or fraudulent company, usually by using a bot of some variety, though electronic means are not the only way to "identity theft" (they just make it easier), gains control of one's credit card or other banking account numbers and uses them for personal gain. Stealing one's ID or driver's license number, or even social security number, may also play a part in ID theft, but generally that information can't get a potential fraud much of anywhere these days — CCN and other account numbers are far more useful.

Grouply does not commit identity theft! Grouply does what Flickr and LiveJournal do:
On LiveJournal, you can "link" your Flickr account to your LJ. You do this by typing in your Flickr ID and password. Similarly, on Grouply, you "link" your Yahoo!Groups ID to your Grouply account by entering your yahoo!Id and password. Of course, Flickr also warns that by linking your Flickr account to a third-party account, such as LiveJournal, that photos marked "private" or as some "friends-only" level, those Flickr photos may be visible via the third-party site — Grouply, on the other hand, says many times on its site that its software is designed so that only a member of, say, EunuchPersonals can access the messages of EunuchPersonals via Grouply (assuming that EunuchPersonals has its archives set to members-only).

Facebook does something very similar with Twitter and YouTube — neither Twitter nor YouTube are affiliated with Facebook, as companies, but you can still plug in your Twitter and YouTube usernames and passwords, and these sites will automatically send updates to your Facebook "newsfeed". You can also "link" your LJ to Facebook in the same way. The concept is very much the same with Grouply. If you disapprove of Grouply waning your Yahoo!Groups name and password to function to its fullest potential, then make sure that you absolutely do not give your Twitter, YouTube, or LJ info to Facebook! If you approve of Facebook asking for this info simply to give you more features, but disapprove of giving Grouply similar info so that it can function to its potential, then quite frankly, you're a hypocrite cos the manner in which these sites both work by integrating with other sites is very much the same.

So what is Grouply, then?
Grouply is a site that offers the service of consolidating all of your groups into a "Smart Digest™", first and foremost. Immediately following that by a hair, it streamlines the web-only view of Yahoo!Groups amazingly well — I know because I'm using it right now.

Grouply also has a relatively new "social" aspect, wherein one can create a "friends network" across the various groups they're in. This is impressive with the personalisation. I, for example, blocked the view of all porn groups I belong to from non-members of those porn groups — now none of my friends get to know what kind of porn I look at! Unlike many social networking sites, you can view your profile as a friend or a non-friend member of X-group, with "X" being selectable from a drop-down list, so that I can make sure that only the porn group members can see that I look at porn. Grouply even invites people to either use one of their own or create a new "dummy account" (they call it a "test account", but I'm old, so I use antiquated speech) just to see how the site works and feels without using their "real" account — this is going above and beyond what any other social networking site does to prove they're legit, and the only reason they're doing it is because of the slew of libellous blog posts that confused people are making based on their own speculation and misconception.

Grouply is not a "scam", as I saw one person claim, either. For it to be a "scam", it would have to sucker financial information out of you, which it does not. Grouply makes its money from advertising, like Facebook and MySpace do, and that means that the more users that they have, the more that they can collect on advertising from advertisers. Unless you want to buy some adspace on Grouply.com, Grouply costs you nothing, nor do they ever ask for money. Grouply has been praise by Linuxchic on the Alternageek podcast, as well as TechCrunch.com and other sites. Grouply complies with Yahoo's Terms of Service, and you'd see that for a site that's been around since September of 2007, that if it truly *was* problematic that a warning would have long-ago been issued by Yahoo itself, the site it primarily works with — but no such official warning from yahoo can be found on the Web, just a bunch of irate speculation on Yahoo!Answers (a breeding ground for armchair "experts" stewing in their own stupidity, if you ask me) from people who have never even attempted to sign up for it, but instead have been spreading around the same blog posts from February of '08.

So let's see what we know at this point:

• You can use Grouply to read your Yahoo!Groups on the web (rather than e-mail) in a more "streamlined" manner than the Yahoo!Groups site offers.


• If you'd rather read via e-mail, You can have Grouply send you a "Smart Digest" of consolidated messages.


• If you got a Grouply invite, technically the site did not send on its own -- it was sent to you by a careless user who clicked "Invite members of these groups" or "Invite these groups" rather than the button that says "skip this step".


• Grouply is therefore not spamming people, it is careless Grouply users who are doing this.


• Grouply really couldn't care less about your financial identity, thus is not committing "identity theft": Grouply is doing nothing different from what LiveJournal offers to Flickr users, in fact, it does Y!Groups users a little better than LJ does Flickr users. Grouply does nothing different than what Facebook suggests that Twitter, YouTube, and LiveJournal users do in order to "link" those accounts with Facebook.


• If you don't want to use Grouply, don't sign up! It's really that simple. You won't be hurting anybody's feelings by not using it.


• If you are the owner of one or more Yahoo!Groups and you decide to "ban all Grouply users", you're an ass.

As stated above, Grouply is doing nothing illegal, and the way it works is no different from how Flickr links LiveJournal accounts or how Facebook links your Twitter, YouTube, and LiveJournal accounts. Don't want to your list to get Grouply invites? Want to disable your group from being read via Grouply? Grouply has given you an opt-out. Just go to grouply.com group owner controls, read through carefully, and then select "Please click here to proceed to Grouply Owner Controls" at the bottom of the page. You will be asked to enter in your Yahoo!Group owner-suffix e-mail (example: "eunuchpersonals-owner@yahoogroups....") and you'll be sent a confirmation code to make sure that you ARE the group's owner. Click the link in your e-mail, enter in the Admin confirmation code, and adjust the settings for your group as you like. Be warned, though, this process may get you to learn that Grouply is a pretty useful tool that can enhance the Yahoo!Groups experience of members of your Yahoo!Group(s).

[this post updated on 2009-03-07]