First Look at SnapGroups: A Delightful Tool For Lightweight Discussion
Mark Fletcher builds software, that's just what he does. He may have sold the system that became Yahoo Groups for $400 million, and then made millions selling Bloglines to Ask.com as well, but that doesn't mean he's going to stop making software. And it's not just any software he makes, either. Those two projects changed millions of peoples' lives.
Tomorrow morning Fletcher will unveil his newest creation, a lightweight group communication tool called SnapGroups. We first wrote about it two weeks ago but hadn't been able to take a look until tonight. We're happy to report that you're probably going to like it a lot: it's easy, it's clear, it's got good social design and it's real time. Check out the screenshots below.
Update: Just after we posted this, Fletcher says he's lifted the password from the site and it's live!
SnapGroups makes it really easy to create a group discussion around a particular topic, invite people, set variable privacy controls and then participate in that conversation as part of a whole "newsfeed" style stream of updates from all your various groups in one place. Fresh comments, likes and dislikes get pushed to your browser live using a home-made bit of AJAX and the whole thing couldn't be much simpler. It's a lot of fun to use, in fact.
Fletcher says this is only the beginning, that all kinds of features are still to come, but he's focused on the basics for now. He started working on the site in October and says his favorite part of the project was "learning about the new technologies that have sprung up in the past couple years." "The various databases that have come out recently are great," he told us. "I'm using Mongo, but there are many interesting projects now." The core of the site is written in C++.
Fletcher says SnapGroups will go live tomorrow morning. You should try it out when it does. Invites to groups will no doubt be flying around Twitter and Facebook. It may very well become something you want to use regularly. Hopefully there will be a way to export your conversations easily. Fletcher is a pretty straightforward guy and will probably implement just about anything that enough people ask for and that isn't too hard to do.
Mark Fletcher has a habit of building relatively simple things, like the first major email list system and the first popular RSS reader, that end up being a defining player in the rise of a new era online. Simple, real-time group communication? Not at all hard to imagine that being a big new thing as well.
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Looks pretty cool! ...and a lot like gravity.com!
They shouldn't have rushed the site, we had about 30 people on it tonight thats to Robert Scoble's Twitter post and with that many people it was too tough to use. This site in it's current form will NOT scale well. Hopefully they can get some changes implemented quickly and get the site back on track. It has promise and overall runs smoothly but it needs major feature additions and tweaks to be usable.
Thanks for the comments! Brad, you're right, with a lot of people posting the site is difficult to follow, and we'll be addressing that over the next few weeks. Snap Groups was originally designed for smaller groups, but it's clear there's a desire to use it for larger groups as well. We wanted to get the site out as quickly as possible so that we'd be able to get user feedback and iterate, improving quickly.
Thanks for the response Mark. While it is designed for smaller discussions but even with 2-3 people responding it was tough to use if they were responding quickly. I'll be very honest that when you were having discussions it WAS fun, and it DID work. I think there just need to be tweaks, and a lot of time put into figuring out how to help users filter out all of the noise that they don't want to see.
I'll definitely be re-visting the site and watching the progress. I do love the simplicity of it really hope you guys figure it all out. GOOD LUCK!
Mark, this looks great! I've already signed up and will be using it.
Do you have a team or is it just a one-man band right now?
Thanks!
-Erica
It is kinda like twitter sorted by hashtags
It's quite interesting project and news both. I want to join him on snap group and I also send request to him but he didn't accepted it yet so can you recommend me to him and tell him to accept me so I can directly get updates from there.
Looks great, simple and light, I like it, great job Mark! Greatest thing is that even if you sell it - you will still make something even better :)
Erica, right now it's mainly me, with a couple of contractors helping out on graphics, HTML and Javascript.
You are so brilliant, cousin! Dad sent me a link, so I had to check this out. Love the line: "Fletcher is a pretty straightforward guy and will probably implement just about anything that enough people ask for and that isn't too hard to do." Aren't all of us Fletchers pretty straightforward? ;)
Kudos to you and that wicked smart brain of yours. You've seemed to hit upon a delectable combination of user-friendly, cool, and geek-chic. Hope to see you soon! Love, Meg