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.

Grouply will shortly announce a more comprehensive ‘Ning to Grouply’ migration tool that will enable a Ning network owner to easily import other important content from their network, says Mark Robins, CEO and co-founder of Grouply.

Of course, there are slight differences between the functionality on the two sites but groups on Grouply provide many of the same core social features as Ning does, including a customizable community website, event management, discussion forums, an activity feed, and an app store with add-on applications.

Grou.ps also provides a similar platform to Ning. The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, etc).

But its important to note that Ning’s traffic and userbase is still much greater than both of these competitors. For example, Grou.ps has 2.8 million users, whereas Ning has at least 37 million users as of last November. And the number of Ning networks that migrate may not be too significant; 75% of Ning’s traffic already comes from premium accounts.

Grouply, a startup that’s built around creating an managing online groups from Google and Yahoo Groups, is launching a more customizable and social version of its service. Launched in 2006, Grouply was one the pioneers of the socialization of groups and essentially lets users combine features of social networks and online groups, incorporating Google and Yahoo Groups products.

The latest version of Grouply, which currently hosts 1.6 million groups, has been enhanced to provide many more customization tools for Grouply groups, giving users the ability to transform the simple appearance of any Google or Yahoo Group into a modern, sleek, colorful website. Grouply provides built-in themes and well as custom templates that can be tweaked easily and without any programming knowledge.

Grouply is also adding features that make it more like a social network instead of a simple group. Groups will now have social activity feeds, directories, and can also promote their groups through search-engine optimization. Users can also see analytics about groups and user activity. And users can monetize groups by running ads and collecting membership fees, donations and event fees. Grouply collects money via a freemium model.

The platform faces competition mainly from Ning, which is steadily growing and already launched many of these features. But in contrast to Ning, Grouply is more centralized around Yahoo’s and Google’s group products, which are still alive and well. In fact, Google, which says its Groups service is one of its most popular products, recently rolled out a a deeper integration of Groups as a feature of its enterprise-focused productivity suite Google Apps. Grouply is also planning to launch integration with Facebook and Twitter soon, and will allow users share their Grouply activities with their friends and followers in the two social platforms.

The overly simple idea behind those loops is this: members join a service and then invite their friends. Rinse and repeat, and you’ve got exponential growth rates.

Things aren’t quite so simple and straightforward (factors like stickiness come into play), but there is a good deal of truth to the idea that users beget users, especially when a mass of them holds a certain value (the so-called “network effect”). So it would come as no surprise if one of Ning’s competitors decided to claim even stronger viral expansion loops.

Grouply, a broad social network divided into groups that are built on top of those found at Yahoo, is making such a claim. Assuming the concepts of groups and networks are tantamount, Grouply claims to have passed Ning, last reported to have 230,000+ networks, with its 300,000+ groups (see chart below). And Grouply is owing its success to the symbiotic (or parasitic?) relationship it has established with Yahoo.

When Grouply started off, it was mainly a tool for members of multiple Yahoo groups to keep track of their activities. It then evolved into a more distinct social networking platform by expanding the ways in which members could interact onsite, thereby bringing it into closer competition with Ning. But while networks on Ning are built from scratch, groups on Grouply must be identified from the start with groups on Yahoo.

This is a double-edged sword to growth. On the one hand, non-Yahoo users will fail to find Grouply as an appealing place to start their niche networks. But Yahoo groups users will find it exceedingly appealing to do so, and it’s that special appeal that boosts Grouply’s adoption rate.

During the Grouply setup process, members of a particular Yahoo group can be sent invites to the new Grouply group (a practice that has led many to accuse Grouply of spamming). Regardless of how enthusiastically Grouply users actually push their new creations, they benefit from the previously formed communities on Yahoo because they can invite members over to the new and improved party. Such well-targeted invitations are why Grouply can assert that it possesses superior viral expansion loops.

So great, Grouply claims to have one-uped Ning. But there’s still a concern over the actual quality of these networks and groups. How many people belong to them on average? How active are their users? How long do those users actually stick around? And what are they up to? No one really knows, outside of the companies themselves. What I’d like to see are companies divulging great levels of detail regarding their usage statistics. That way we can truly gauge the relative success of these social platforms, the proliferation of which continues every day.

The newly launched features are collectively called “Grouply Social” and include all the social networking features you’d expect. User profile pages show your interests, personal history, and contact information. The pages also support multimedia like most social networks, allowing users to share photos, videos, and “widgets” from sites like YouTube and Slide. Members can also befriend each other, with full privacy controls. You can decide who has access to your profile and what portions they can see, similar to Facebook.

The rest of the internet is clearly blowing past these older “groups” services when it comes to usability and engagement. Sites like Tangler, Wetpaint, and Klostu are creating whole new systems to bring online forums up to speed. As we’ve said before, Grouply is taking an evolutionary approach by absorbing users and data from existing systems and enhancing their functionality. Grouply recently raised over $1.3 million.

Grouply offers a centralized discussion platform that allows users to track and manage their discussions on sites such as Google Groups (coming soon) and Yahoo Groups.

To quote Nick from our November 2007 review:

Grouply, in effect, takes over your interface with the groups websites. You can carry out all your normal tasks from Yahoo Groups, but with an added management and social layer. Simply give it your credentials and Grouply starts tracking your conversations across your groups. Technically speaking, Grouply does this by substituting an @grouply email address for your email contact to start receiving group updates on your behalf. All your messages are collected into one main feed with several intelligent ways of sorting through them for information you care about. Messages are organized by group, threaded by conversation, rated, and tagged. Any ratings or tags users add to a messages are shared with other members. Each message thread is automatically put into one of five groups identified by icons: discussion, wanted, events, for sale, and news. They’re also organized into summary feeds and smart digest, which only show you updates for conversations you’ve shown some interest in by reading.

But these forums can be somewhat dated when compared to their modern social networking brethren or at the very least inconvenient when your interests span multiple domains. Managing your conversation across multiple boards can be a pain. Grouply, a startup that’s been flying relatively under the radar, aims to provide an easier way to manage your conversations across these groups and social features. They plan to expand to all online groups, but they’re starting with Yahoo and Google Groups. Klostu is another startup looking to simplify the long tail of message boards. Meetro is expected to launch their own simplified forum system as well.

Grouply, in effect, takes over your interface with the groups websites. You can carry out all your normal tasks from Yahoo Groups, but with an added management and social layer. Simply give it your credentials and Grouply starts tracking your conversations across your groups. Technically speaking, Grouply does this by substituting an @grouply email address for your email contact to start receiving group updates on your behalf. All your messages are collected into one main feed with several intelligent ways of sorting through them for information you care about. Messages are organized by group, threaded by conversation, rated, and tagged. Any ratings or tags users add to a messages are shared with other members. Each message thread is automatically put into one of five groups identified by icons: discussion, wanted, events, for sale, and news. They’re also organized into summary feeds and smart digest, which only show you updates for conversations you’ve shown some interest in by reading.

I can only imagine that Grouply is going through the trouble of improving upon Yahoo and Google Groups so that one day it becomes simply easier to use Grouply instead of the boards they manage. It’s kind of an evolutionary instead of revolutionary strategy.

Tonight they added new feature that should generate a lot of page views – they have fully integrated a forum/message board into every wiki.

This isn’t Tangler-level forums (which we consider to be the bleeding edge), but they’ve put a lot of thought into the feature set around these message boards. Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks.

CEO Ben Elowitz says the two products go together well – wikis are great for evergreen content but don’t allow for good conversation. Forums allow great conversation but aren’t great for new readers. The hope is that by combining them they’ll allow for better content for all users. And in the process get a lot of page views.

Other startups innovating in the forum space (besides Tangler, mentioned above) are Meetro and Grouply.

The hosted wiki space is crowded, and Wetpaint competes with Wikia and PBWiki, among others. Comscore shows Wikia in the lead with over 3 million monthly uniques, followed by Wetpaint with 1.3 million and PBWiki with 770k (Wikipedia, of course, is the 800 pound gorilla, with 228 million unique monthly visitors):

Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.

He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.

Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete.