Fletcher planned on unveiling the company tonight at Dave McClure's Palo Alto event Lean Startups but had technical problems hours before going on stage that delayed the launch of the site. None the less, he offered some details about what we can expect next week.

Fletcher promised that SnapGroups will include rainbows and unicorns specifically, but thematically will be focused on real-time group communication. Given the company's name, we presume SnapGroups will facilitate quick and easy group creation. "Groups are incredibly powerful," Fletcher said tonight, "the best thing about the internet is group communication. But over the last 10 to 12 years groups have stagnated. Yahoo hasn't done anything with Yahoo Groups."

Fletcher said he used outsourced development and design services extensively in creating SnapGroups. He built the site for a mere $6k, a tiny fraction of what it took to build his previous products. There will be Twitter integration at launch and Facebook integration later. "We will tap into power-user groups at first," Fletcher explained, "and have larger moderator groups to help shape the service going forward."

Here at ReadWriteWeb we agree that groups are where it's at, see our write-up titled Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web. We're very excited to see how Fletcher productizes the ability to communicate with groups of people. Watch this space next week.

The San Francisco based social groupware provider Grou.ps announced today that it has secured a Series A round of financing for $1.1 Million in a deal led by Golden Horn Ventures. Grou.ps has also announced that it is open sourcing a restricted version of its code under the Affero Public License.

Grou.ps aims to provide users with a comprehensive set of tools to collaborate online and currently has about 200,000 active users worldwide.

Going Open Source

In open-sourcing its application, Grou.ps is following in the steps of a growing number of formerly closed source online services that have decided to go this route lately, with Reddit probably being the most prominent one. Grou.ps argues that this move will allow them to commoditize the Grou.ps platform and give them a competitive advantage to hire the most talented programmers from the pool of open source contributors.

However, opening up the code is not a panacea for developers by any means - while some programs flourish once a lot of developers get their hands on the code, others have a hard time developing an active developer community around their open source offerings.

Grou.ps' closest competitor, Ning, has a considerably larger user base and offers a very similar service. However, while Ning has advertising on its pages, grou.ps does not - though you can add your own AdSense code to the site. Ning, so far, has raised about $104 Million in four funding rounds.

Disclosure: Grou.ps founder Emre Sokullu has been a contributor to ReadWriteWeb in the past.