In online classifieds, as with any marketplace, the more buyers and sellers a company can bring together, the more listings it can generate. Oodle is about to add 1.6 million groups to its social commerce platform. Oodle is acquiring Grouply in a deal which could be announced as soon as today.
Oodle powers social classifieds on Facebook and MySpace. Now, presumably, it will offer classifieds as an option on Grouply sites as well.
Grouply is a do-it-yourself social network built on top of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. It takes those groups out of forum and mass email hell, and gives them their own sites. It competes with Ning, and in fact is trying to attract Ning refugees who don’t want to pay for that service. The deal might save the startup from having to compete with Ning.
The size of the deal is likely modest. Grouply raised a total of $2.6 million, most recently $1.3 million in January, 2008. Whereas Oodle has raised a total of $23 million. Investors in Grouply include Reid Hoffman, Jeff Clavier, and the Harvard Angel Group.
Craig Donato, Scott Kister, and Faith Sedlin founded Oodle, a social marketplace, in 2004. Oodle also powers the Facebook Marketplace, the app for buying,selling and sharing with your Facebook community. Oodle has received funding from Greylock, Redpoint Ventures, and Jafco Ventures.
Grouply is pioneering the “social group†— a new type of online community that combines the best features of social networks and online groups. Social groups offer the social interactivity, media sharing, and modern design of social networking sites like Facebook; and the rich discussions, popular email interface, and people-discovery opportunities found in traditional online group systems like Yahoo! Groups. With Grouply, you can create a new social group about anything you like or join a social group and...
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