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Announcing Launch Of MangoSpring SiteGroups

Posted by anup on July 17, 2008 RSS Feed

TEAR DOWN THE WALL! HELP WEBSITE VISITORS DISCOVER EACH OTHER
 MangoSpring SiteGroups® creates an interest based IM community for your website - instantly.

Seattle, WA. - July 17, 2008 –Visiting a website has been a lonely experience. Although there are hundreds of thousands of people visiting a given website at any point of time, visitors are unaware of each other. There is a virtual wall that exists between the website visitors, preventing them from knowing who else is on the same website. If visitors could see and talk to others who are doing the same things on a website as they are, significant possibilities of communication and interaction can open up. It can lead to building of ‘interest networks’, and in turn create extremely sticky and loyal users for a website. As for the website visitors themselves, they can build their social networks within the context of the services they use as opposed to having to visit destination social networks for the sake of social networking.

Seattle based startup MangoSpring (MangoSpring.com) has now made it possible for websites to unlock the value that a real time messaging community based around their content can bring. Websites can now deploy MangoSpring’s product, SiteGroups that enables visitors on a website to view others who are online with them on a website, and communicate in a group or via private conversations. SiteGroups also comes as mobile and desktop clients, so the website visitors can stay connected to their favorite communities from anywhere, creating further loyalty.

“Users today want their online experience to be more social. Success of social networks and communities like Facebook, Myspace, and Flickr support the trend” said Anup Kejriwal, founder and CEO of MangoSpring. “SiteGroups adds a face to every website visitor and humanizes their web experience by bringing real-world-like interactivity around a website and its content. The last time social networking around presence was tried, it led to creating powerful, but siloed IM communities like AIM, MSN and Yahoo. SiteGroups brings the same power and user loyalty to all websites around the world by connecting and engaging their visitors. In essence, SiteGroups brings the power of social networking to every website owner and creates new business opportunities for them”.

SiteGroups comes in three different flavors – Business, Standard and Community. SiteGroups community edition is available through a simple do-it-yourself interface that allows instant creation and installation of the community without a need for any programming knowledge. Community edition is available for free and is supported by ads. SiteGroups will share a percentage of ad revenues with website owners, offering them innovative ways to better monetize their users.

The Business and Standard editions are tailored for larger websites that attract significant traffic and need deeper integration and customization. SiteGroups Business and Standard editions can be fully customized to meet unique business needs of larger websites. In addition to monitoring and moderation capabilities, website owners have access to a feature-packed administrative console giving them easy access to numerous configuration, metrics and community management tools.

About MangoSpring
Founded in 2007, MangoSpring offers group-centric communication technology that enables instant, intelligent, focused, one-to-one or multi-party discussions over web, desktop and mobile. These conversations securely connect website visitors, employees, partners or customers with the right people and persist as long as it makes sense.

MangoSpring Group software is targeted towards companies in a variety of industries, including social networking, technology, media, content, interest communities & groups, eCommerce and financial services. MangoSpring’s worldwide headquarters are in Seattle, Washington and EMEA headquarters in Pune, India. For more information, visit the MangoSpring website at MangoSpring.com.

For more information about MangoSpring SiteGroups, please contact:

Anuj Khurana
Director, Product Marketing
Tel: (425) 274-9950, anujk@mangospring.com


Advancing the web one conversation at a time

Posted by anup on July 11, 2008 RSS Feed

About a year and half back when we first started MangoSpring we had this vision of making the web a more connected experience. We spoke extensively of web being a lonely experience and “connected everywhere” as our driving mission. We had this exciting contest in the office where teams came up with the best use case for ‘connected every where’ paradigm (winning team members got IPods). MangoSpring SiteGroups and our internal vision of ‘advancing the web one conversation at a time‘ was born out of these discussions and aspirations.

A few days back I came across this interesting article on ReadWriteWeb about the real time web deserving a place in the “next big thing” column. To quote from the article “a real time web can offer social connectedness, interface responsiveness and a smooth user experience that stands head and shoulders above the call-and-response web of the past.”

Wow! that is exactly what we have been after and I was glad to see the good folks at ReadWriteWeb talk about it. Needless to say, we see an immense potential in creating an instant community around a website/service and making the web browsing experience real time.

So how is MangoSpring advancing real time web?. Well like I said our vision is to advance it ‘one conversation at a time’. MangoSpring SiteGroups enables any website in the world big or small, any blog, any web page for that matter to add real time interactivity and conversations around it in a matter of few minutes. The premise is simple:

  • Show the people who are on the same site as you are (not necessarily the same page) in real time
  • Allow them to talk to each other as a collective group
  • Allow them to talk to each other in 1-1 setting
  • Allow them to easily carry these conversations with them as they move away from the site by offering rich desktop and mobile access to this micro-community

We are very close to launching SiteGroups and hope that you will be as excited about the possibilities SiteGroup opens up as we are.

Browser based real time web - Extreme social networking?

Posted by anup on June 19, 2008 RSS Feed

One trend that has me intrigued is that of browser based social networks. Flock, has been around for a while and now there are others like Slingpage and Me.dium. In fact RWW called it the ‘extreme social networking‘. These plug ins allow you to see which web site your friends are on and then chat with them.

So why am I writing about them? Well because they come at the same problem we are addressing with MangoSpring SiteGroups but from a completely different perspective. Both SiteGroups and tools like Me.dium enable:

  • Real time interaction on the web
  • Messaging with others on the same site

The key difference between SiteGroups and plugin based approach is that:

  • SiteGroups helps the site owner monetize the implicit social network they already have as it builds a service centric community as oppose to user-centric community
  • As SiteGroups is integrated by the business owner as part of its website, provides a richer and relevant experience
  • Is universally available to all users of the site

In addition, as plugins are built around browsers, they tend to ignore the multi-platform, multi-device world we live in.

Evolution of communication - Explicit to implicit

Posted by anup on May 16, 2008 RSS Feed

We went from closed communication on email to closed real time communication over IM. Along came always connected communication using SMS and mobile. Blogs and social networks made us go public with our messages to friends and now twitter is making us broadcast minute by minute updates of our lives.

So trying to force a sequential timeline on how we communicate in the digital world, looks something like:

BBS/IRC > Bulletin boards > Chat rooms> Email > IM > SMS > Blogs/Social networks > Twitter/Lifestreaming

Most of this is often described as ‘explicit communication or explicit social networks’. As per the Churchill Club of Silicon Valley debate, the next big trend on internet is going to be ‘Implicit web’ (read the post on VentureBeat). This is the missing element when RWW tried to discuss the evolution of communication.

We at MangoSpring firmly believe in the future of implicit communities fostering communication. The fact that you are on the same site/page as x other users puts you in an implicit community allowing communication, sharing and collaboration. It also captures your ‘attention data’ and build the community around it. Of course the secret sauce is going to be how you group the people beyond presence on a site or membership to a community. So if i am on TechCrunch reading yet another post on twitter or FriendFeed I am going to want to crib and rant about it to others who are reading the same post. But I would rather do it on TechCrunch as I read it. Don’t expect me to sign up to a group or community or a social network to be able to do so. And it would be great if users who were reading up on FriendFeed competition that just launched are also implicitly visible to me so they can join in the discussion.

So if you are wondering where that leaves the explicit communities ( read as Facebook, Myspace, Ning) ? Well I dont think much changes for them there is always going to be a need for both. Though I do see interesting scenarios where we merge the membership of explicit networks with the communities I am implicitly part of.

IM for websites- a trend to watch

Posted by anup on April 6, 2008 RSS Feed

Read this post on RWW about IM for websites is a trend to watch. To quote from the post ‘ I think real-time chat in websites is a trend we’ll see more of during 2007 and beyond. While IM services like AIM and Yahoo Messenger dominate the chat market, there is room for turn-key chat solutions like Userplane or Tangler for web sites and online communities.’

This was back in early 2007, and we are well into the second half of 2008. The trend is yet to take off - something that we hope to change with SiteGroups. Stay tuned for public launch of SiteGroups; its round the corner.

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