RWW first covered Sampa in June 2006 and the service certainly evolved since then. It went from being an overly techie-looking blogging platform to a user-friendly family tool with built-in family tree, baby countdown timer and import functionality from Flickr and YouTube.

Despite having shaped itself into a great tool, in the current market, Sampa's closure seemed a high possibility. Sampa was often compared to the more well-known Yahoo GeoCities service. When ReadWriteWeb profiled the closure of GeoCities in April we predicted that a number of web site building tools would also meet their unfortunate end. As non-commercial users increasingly produce content for 3rd party networks and blogs, the family web-building space becomes even smaller.

Sampa recommends users export their baby-related site materials to TotSites, their family journals to Cozi and their general purpose blogs to WordPress. Another smart option might be Picalily. Meanwhile those looking for a simple family tree application might want to try Geni or Genoom.

GroupSwim is an innovative company which has created an intelligent community building and collaboration SaaS solution. It was mentioned here on RWW previously as one of the finalists in the Enterprise 2.0 launch pad. GroupSwim aims to connect individuals and build knowledge utilising social based methodologies. Their method of working comes from four observations of  current offerings and methods of working:

So what does GroupSwim offer? Their solution has:

• A nice Web 2.0 interface
• An open architecture that allows it to grow, adapt and morph at will
• The benefit of leveraging community intelligence
• A robust enterprise grade architecture

How does it work?

Once a user creates an account, they can create multiple communities within their account. This has two benefits - it means a business can have different communities for different parts of the business, but it also means that an individual user, with one single sign on, can access all of the groups they are subscribed to. This is all nice but not unique, GroupSwim's main benefit comes from its semantic approach and its qualitative differentiation techniques which together improve functionality and user experience.

Semantic Approach

Content entered into a discussion is automatically analysed and tagged with keywords. This allows better classification, better searching and a more relevant and proactive customer experience to be offered to the user. Of course users can edit, change and add to the automatically generated tags but it speeds up the process no end. My experience with other collaborative platforms is that the search tends to be a little clunky - often giving poor results, Groupswim's semantic search improves the search and therefore overall usability of the service.

Qualitative Differentiation

GroupSwim keeps a running tally on both explicit and implicit rating of material. Explicit rating comes from user ratings as per other solutions, implicit rating comes from a host of automatically assessed criteria - how often an item is read, how many times it is on-forwarded, how long it remains open etc. In this way users get a true assessment of the quality of any piece of content. Groupswim have done a nice job of capturing the two streams of rating - together the overall rating gives an improved experience - this coupled with the semantic search really sped things up in my trial.

Conclusion

GroupSwim provides a compelling offering - I can see it providing real value for organisational community building both internally and externally. Check out their elevator pitch video below.

Market Players

Geocities itself is still active in the website creation market. Here are some of its competitors:

• Google Sites (it evolved out of one of Google's acquisitions, JotSpot, and is now available for free separately from Google Apps)
• Weebly (a Y Combinator company)
• SynthaSite (our coverage)
• Sampa (our coverage)
• SiteKreator
• Webon (a recently launched offering from Web 1.0 stalwart Lycos)

Who's using these products? Website creation platforms are aimed at people who just want a regular website; for example people who want to chronicle their wedding or holiday, families who want to track their family history and growth, or retailers who want to build a web presence.

Often these tools have 'drag and drop' functionality, so you can create a new website in a matter of hours without needing to know HTML or have particular design skills. Lycos told us that their product Webon is "geared toward more casual users, e.g. parents, travelers, shutterbugs, who want more control and a more stylized web presence than typical blogging tools or social network profiles allow for."

Note that you could argue that DIY social networks like Ning are competing in this space, although Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen thinks otherwise. I'm inclined to agree with him, because social networks, blogs, wikis, and websites are all different beasts.

Social Web Twist

Website builder platforms in the web 2.0 era, where mashups and open data are common, typically offer ways to integrate with 3rd party apps. This can take the form of widgets, or even utilizing other sites' APIs. This is probably the biggest difference between Geocities 1.0 and the 2.0 era web publishing platforms. But also these platforms usually offer the ability to add blogs, RSS feeds, multimedia, privacy controls, and more.

Google Sites diagram, from their homepage

As an example of what these products now offer, Lycos told us recently that Webon supports the OpenSocial API "for thousands of add-ons and widgets (such as iGoogle gadgets and Google FriendConnect), with no HTML or CSS knowledge needed, as well as OpenID to enable DIY social network connections."

Another common feature in the new website creation tools is use of Ajax to build sites. While at the Web 2.0 Expo a couple of months ago, I dropped by the SynthaSite booth and was very impressed with the rich functionality and the ability to drag n' drop ajax widgets.

Who's Leading This Market?

Geocities and Google Sites have the biggest presence, simply because of their bigco backing. Among the startups, according to stats from Compete, the leading small co is Weebly with SynthaSite showing positive growth.

Conclusion

An old cliche that Web entrepreneurs often wheel out at press time is that the market pie (for whatever segment they're in) is only getting bigger, so there's plenty of room for them and their competitors too. Well in the case of website creation tools, that's certainly true! One of the primary characteristics of the social web - aka web 2.0 - is that anyone can easily publish content to the Web. So there is a lot more need these days, compared to the 90's, for web publishing platforms of all varieties. Many RWW readers probably use blogging and/or social network tools, and micro-publishing tools like Twitter and FriendFeed. But for many other people, straight website creation tools - like Geocities and its many competitors - fit their needs better.

To finish, here's a brain teaser for you: what will Geocities 3.0 look like? ;-)