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Six Groups: “one community on the go please”

Ernst-Jan Written on May 15, 2008 – 11:20 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

When you own a blog, you’re probably always looking for ways to create a bond with your readers. If your readers feel connected to you, they’ll probably comment and read more. Not to mention the power of word of mouth. A good way to create this sort of commitment is an integrated social network. There are several Wordpress plugins offering extra functions with a social network feel to it, yet it takes a lot of time, knowledge and effort to modify them to your needs. So I’m glad to tell you a new start-up has come along which offers an instant community for your convenience.

Patrick de Laive, Andreas Stephan from Six Groups, and me at Next08
Patrick, Andreas Stephan from Six Groups, and undersigned

German-based Six Groups has developed an easy tool that allows you to include a community by just copy/pasting a javascript snippet. This adds a bar at the top of your page, showing a community lifestream, the number of users that are online and a sign-up button. You can customize the design by selecting a theme. As a user you have access to the regular social networks features, like a wall, lifestream and a personal library for photos and text documents. All in all, it’s a pretty neat community solution for bloggers and site owners who don’t have the budget for a totally-customized social network.

I met the Six Groups founders last night at the Facebook Developer Garage after party in Hamburg. They’re presenting at the Next08 conference today and already have an alpha version of their tool running on the Next08 site (So check that one out). When I was talking to co-founder Andreas Stephan, I immediately started thinking about the “yet another sign-up page”-tiredness. I’ve signed up to enough social networks already. So I said to him I’d only blog about his start-up if he promised to support OpenID. He did, so let’s see whether Six Groups lives up to it.

I hope you like that post!

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About the author: Ernst-Jan is a blogger and journalist, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five.

8 comments/trackbacks to “Six Groups: “one community on the go please””

  1. May 15, 2008: six groups bringt Social Networks auf externe Seiten – schneller als MySpace  Co » Beitrag » zweinull.cc

    [...] six groups-Mitbegründer Andreas Stephan hat Ernst-Jan Pfauth von The Next Web das Versprechen gegeben, dass bald auch der Login mit OpenID möglich sein [...]

  2. May 21, 2008: Launch der Livecommunity: O-Töne und Reaktionen at six groups blog

    [...] The Next Web: “One community on the go please” (ganzer Artikel) [...]

  3. Jun 6, 2008: Update: OpenID und Amazon S3 at six groups blog

    [...] groups bietet nun, wie versprochen (2), zusätzlich zur Anmeldung mit Benutzername und Passwort auch OpenID an. Mit OpenID wird das [...]

  4. Jun 23, 2008: Jimdo: Pages AND OpenID to the people

    [...] the little OpenID incident at Next08 in May? I promised Andreas Stephan from Six Groups that I would blog about his service, [...]

  1. By Ivailo on May 16, 2008 | Reply

    how is this different from MyBlogLog?
    Perhaps I am missing something?

  2. By jan on May 16, 2008 | Reply

    Hi,

    yeah its quite different.
    you can interact realtime with other visitors!

  3. By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on May 17, 2008 | Reply

    @Ivailo Well, the name of MyBlogLog says it all: it focuses on bloggers. Six Groups is a service for the masses.

  4. By Helge on Jun 6, 2008 | Reply

    As promised: six groups supports OpenID now!

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