Stay in the loop with GroupLoop.

I start this post with a generous hat tip to Dan of idano.net, who clued me and several others in on the fact that PPP actually does offer a syndicatable feed of opportunities via FeedBurner.

If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have discovered GroupLoop.com today.

What GroupLoop is, is almost simple to explain.
It’s a way for a group to get together, organize, discuss, and plan their work, all from the convenience of one website.
I know that some of you may be thinking, “But that’s what email is for!”

I couldn’t disagree more.

Email is fine for some things, but when you want to plan important things that affect everyone, email becomes the single point of failure. If John’s home email account is full, the messages will start bouncing, and he won’t even know you’re trying to contact him about something. If Beth is out somewhere, and can’t check email for six hours, but you’re trying to get her to show up for something in six hours, she won’t see the message until it’s too late.

Woe betide the corporation that tries to communicate solely by email, too. It’s fine for private, one-on-one communications, but to manage important lists, it’s better to have some sort of web based interface that you can rely on.

It becomes a trivial task for a user to log in to a single webpage, and at a glance, know what’s going on with the plans.
This is the kind of service GroupLoop offers.

I had the priviledge of trying it out for myself today, at no cost.

Account creation is almost painless, and the Terms of Service are rather easy to read and digest, which made signup easy to do.
The only thing I would change on signup is that I would NOT send the user’s password in an email to them, when they just put it in the form. That defeats the purpose of a secure password — having it mailed back to you in the clear. I’d also consider securing the form used to do the signups; Maybe insert a humanizer of some sort (captcha, audio captcha, simple math question, account verification code — pick one or two, preferably the last two, since math is the universal language, and it’s not that hard to click a link in an email) to make sure someone doesn’t decide to slam that signup form with cURL or other utilities.

Once I got signed up, I went straight to the login screen.
What I would change here is add some sort of identifier as to what group this is. Sure, you have the URL, but it’d be nice for me to see “Pixelechoes Network” or some other identifier that shows me what group it is, which would help to assure me that I’m not wandering into a spoofed page.

Logging in was simple, as it should be, but again, I’d rather secure the login form there, as well, which I do feel would appeal a bit more to corporate entities considering the adoption of the system.

When you log in, the interface is relatively clean and simple, with very few changes that I could suggest:
On the home page, I’d consider adding a link to create a new message, calendar event, or upload a document next to the respective modules. It would fit in well, and keep people from having to dig in to navigate and get to work.

… okay, so it would save a single click in each case, but it would make the user interface make a bit more sesnse. I was expecting to see “Post new message” next to “Recent messages”.

I had a look at the messages tab after that.
They offer users a simple markup format (similar to that of Markdown, or Textile) for formatting their messages.
This is a good thing, I would say, since it’s easier for newer users to adapt to their system.
I would also consider offering the opportunity to switch on a BBCode-like system for those who are more familiar with it, or need more power than the proffered markup.

While looking at messages, I’d like to see the most recent message either in its entirety or the first thousand bytes, and all subsequent messages show only fragments (first five hundred bytes or less). However, something tells me that if a Greasemonkey Pro got their hands on this, they would put together a user.js that would pull off this exact request, so I’m not entirely worried.

Looking at the calendar, I can say they did a good job with making it easy to add any group calendar event to anything that supports the iCalendar format (which would be just about every calendar/planner software that a user can mention, as far as I know).

On the Document Upload feature, I’d like to see recognition for more formats than just Microsoft Word. Stuff like the Open Document format, or LaTeX, would be nice, for starters.
I’d also like to see an indicator there as to how much space the files are taking up, so that it’d be easier to know when you’re getting close to the limit.

In summary, [tag]GroupLoop[/tag] looks to be a rather promising tool, and I do wish them success in their endeavour. I would also hope that they do consider analyzing any feedback they get, and seeing what is plausible to fix.

– nifty tool. Thanks for showing it to me, [tag]PayPerPost![/tag]