CollectiveX competitors

Also, another competitor. I signed up today. Looks like Facebook for business.

www.myquire.com

FYI
http://www.twine.com/about

Twine is a new service that intelligently helps you share, organize and find information with people you trust.

Share more productively. In Twine you can safely share information and knowledge, and collaborate around common interests, activities and goals. Twine helps you better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your network. Use Twine to share more productively with friends, colleagues, groups and teams.

Get more organized. Twine provides one place to tie everything together: emails, bookmarks, documents, RSS feeds, contacts, photos, videos, product info, data records, and more. And, because Twine actually understands the meaning of any information you add in, it helps you organize all your stuff automatically. Finally, you can search and browse everything and everyone you know, about anything, in one convenient place.

Jonathan,

I read the Read/Write web blog and I read about Twine as well. Give it a try when it comes out and let us know how it is. Read/Write web compares it to Wikipedia.

Clarence

Our organization is looking for a tool very much like Collectivex, but which has a solid project management tool. Unfortunately, Collectivex doesn't offer this (yet?). So I'm looking at Sosius, GoPlan and MyQuire. Are there others which you might recommend or are you aware of a trusted widget we can add to Collectivex for this purpose? Project management is a must-have.

I found this chart on TechCrunch. There was only two options for me, Ning.com which I am already very familiar with and impressed by and CollectiveX. I like both a lot for different reasons. I guess KickApps is popular too but is maybe too heavy to get going.

Exhaustive Comparison Chart

Clarence - 

First off, thanks for building such a neat product.

Like William, I'm playing with both Ning and Cx and trying to decide which way to go for a new group home.

I love Ning's layout and branding options. I love Cx's calendar, updates, blasts and homepage content. As a visual guy, it's hard to fall in love with the limitations of Cx's platform. Our brand is very important to us.

Here's my group's homepage (We have about 350 members): http://www.motorcityconnect.com/

Here's our Cx (we've had this one a bit longer than the ning version): http://motorcityconnect.collectivex.com/main/summary

Now look at the Ning test version: http://motorcityconnect.ning.com/

What's ahead for Cx on the graphical side?

- Charlie

Charlie,

I am so happy that you asked that question. Your timing is great. Like you... I consider myself to be a branding / visual guy... so improving the look and flexibility of the Groupsite UI is very important to me.  Here is what we are currently working on.

• New more flexible Groupsite template UI - the new UI will be wider (950 pixels wide) and more customizable. The summary page will be highly customizable (think Netvibes) however, the main navigation will remain consistent across a groupsites but will change slightly to support the addition of more features overtime. 
• The New Nav bar will include the following:
  
  
  
  • Summary (can be renamed to Home or Main) - 
  • Communicate (will produce a roll-over drop menu that contains sections including: Discussions, Email Blasts, Blog)
  • Share (will produce a roll-over drop-menu that contains sections including: Files, Photos, Videos) 
  • Network (will produce a roll-over drop-menu that contains sections including: Members, Objectives, Connections) 
  • More (will be an editable section that can be renamed to whatever you choose. The more section will also be a roll-over drop-menu that the group manager can fill with as many pages as needed. 
    

  
  

• 90% editable stylesheet.  For advanced users of CSS, we will allow for stylesheet editing but not the ability to change the layout of the main navigation/menu structure.  We feel allowing the structure or location of the navigation to change would significantly diminish useability and confuses users who belong to multiple Groupsites.
• Multiple Style Sheet Variations - Overtime we will over multiple base stylesheets to choose from. The standard style sheet will be available in 10 base colors (like we have now) but we will add others as well. 

William,

We are very familiar with the Techcrunch chart but it is waaaaaay out of date. It turns out that the chart was put together by Techcrunch staff a few days before we released major enhancements last August.  However, it does give a sense of how we stack up versus other offerings.  

Despite the many offerings, we distinguish ourselves by focusing on engagement versus media consumption. Example: Ning is probably a better place to go if you want to create a fan club network based around a MySpace-like experience... we are the place to go if you want to engage and get things done across all of your social or professional-oriented groups.

Regards,

Clarence

Great Stuff, Clarence.

I'm hoping you forgot to type "Calendar" when you were laying out the new nav. Live events are a key to our online group's success.

Keep up the great work.

- Charlie

Feature Request:  Will we ever be able to insert our own Adsense code?  How can we monetize our Groupsites?

hi tom - you can insert adsense code on the summary page in the sidebar, if you click "edit" and use the "HTML source" rather than the basic or advanced editor.

ah...got it! Thanks...just getting familiar with the system.  Thanks Gareth!

Anyone have any input on potential CollectiveX competitor igroops.com?  Is that solution any good?  What are the differences? How do the 2 compare?

It is interesting to see that Ning is going the way of removing the free option altogether and just offering three paid plans - http://about.ning.com/announcement/plans.php

Their 19.95 plan looks alright, with some integration from other services (facebook, twitter) and decent storage. Overall I prefer the more formal community approach of groupsite, but it is interesting to see this space develop over time. Whats in the pipeline for Groupsites?

Groupsite is a much much better product than Ning. This is the right time for Groupsite to take this as an opportunity.