"groups" sites

[ghell]

Some friends of mine have started using grou.ps as a way of sharing photos and videos with its own little mini-forum, sharing comments, etc.

I assume that this is similar to microsoft/yahoo/google groups or whoever else does these kinds of things and that they just didn't want to use those.

They don't want to use a social networking site like facebook either, as they just want it to be for a small group of friends.


However, grou.ps is frankly a giant POS, is slow and if if actually manages to load, barely works (you have to register once to get on it, then register with the exact same information again to join a group, then can't log in from certain browsers, get "hacking attempt" messages randomly, get generic messages like "the picture has uploaded but an error has occured", etc.


Does anyone know of any alternative, either as a free hosted service or free software to put on an existing host? Would Elgg (http://elgg.org/) work as a replacement for grou.ps, for example?

[brad211987]

Anything against google apps? For personal use with friends/social groups its free and gives you google docs, mail, sites, pages etc... I use google sites to house some development resources and share documents, very fast and easy to use.

[ghell]

Thanks.

Is there a (preferably live) preview of it anywhere so that I can see what it's like?


I use SVN for the things you are using it for by the way :)

[brad211987]

I don't know of a live preview, but it only takes 30 seconds or so to create a site and start toying around with it.

I use SVN for quite a bit as well, but most of the people that I'm sharing with are still getting used to this strange thing called the internet. :thumbsup:

[ghell]

So is there actually a google "group" type application? I went to http://www.google.com/apps/ but all it seems to be is a list of their products (such as chrome and translations), which aren't really what I want and don't tie in with each other into a single site.

[brad211987]

If your going the google route, sounds like you want something similar to Google Groups and Google Sites:

http://groups.google.com/
http://sites.google.com

I've never used google groups but it seems essentially like a forum/mailing list. I use google sites as a quick and dirty wiki that I post documents(it does versioning too), create category pages and post just general information for a project. Google sites gives you 100 MB of storage per site, and I've not seen anything about a limit on number of sites.

Google apps will let you use your own domain and direct email to it, along with all of the sharing tools that google has independently. The premium google apps service has more storage, some extra features and costs something like $50 per user per year and is geard towards businesses.

[ghell]

I'm not particularly "going the google route", you just suggested "google apps" so I'm following up on it.

The first post already says that they don't want google groups but something similar to it (without any need to get a new email address or "msn passport" or whatever and preferably with no adverts either).

I was sure they closed off google sites years ago but I may be thinking of something else that was then replaced with sites. The screen shots make them look like glorified calendars though whereas they want something where people have their own profiles, can add videos (embeds to youtube really), can upload photos of themselves for a site-wide gallery, have a small discussion forum, etc.

They don't want a wordpress blog or a mediawiki or anything like that either. They also don't want any email options etc (if they wanted that, I run my own IMAP/SMTP [postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, etc] servers anyway and they need only get their domain name and I would host it for them).

They also want more than just a bulletin board/forum (or I would just set them up a phpBB board).

Ideally they don't want to have to pay for a domain name at all and are fine with directories or subdomains if it is a free hosting service (grou.ps uses directories).

[liorean]

If your going the google route, sounds like you want something similar to Google Groups and Google Sites:

http://groups.google.com/
http://sites.google.com

I've never used google groups but it seems essentially like a forum/mailing list. I use google sites as a quick and dirty wiki that I post documents(it does versioning too), create category pages and post just general information for a project. Google sites gives you 100 MB of storage per site, and I've not seen anything about a limit on number of sites.Google bought DejaNews a few years back, to get at their usenet archive. Google groups is the result of that. Naturally since usenet is the mother of the idea behind mailing lists and predates the entire concept of web forums, it's "essentially like a forum/mailing list".