Six Groups Instant Communities For The Rest Of Us

We got a chance to take a sneak peek at six groups, a soon to be launched platform for creating communities without technical skills and for free.

It goes without saying that these user generated communities have all features we have come to expect (user- and contactmanagement, photo and document sharing, profiles, messages, a blog, etc.) The design can be customised as well as various other modules of the communities. They also will provide white label solutions for companies or clubs who want to build a community using their own brand.

An interesting feature is their metacommunity approach :

We try to represent real life structures and provide each user with a global set of data which are available at any community a user might join. This includes a user’s profile, his contacts, messages, photos or blog entries. Users can decide for each network which information should be made available.

The site is nicely executed and has a consistent design.

So far so good, but how many more social networks do we need?

The risk most vertical social networks face is that they need to become reasonably popular in order to make their founders happy and based on the hypertrophic output 95% of them simply will not.

six groups is spreading the risk and harvesting the long tail of social networks. Communities at six groups just need to be useful to a couple of users to be valuable as long as there are a lot of them or some of them become popular.

In a way six groups took a good look at Ning, applied the pareto principle to it and extracted the most promising elements. Ning always has been a platform filled with potential and unlimited possibilities, but nobody was able to unleash it until they refocused about six months ago and started to brand it as a platform to Create Your Own Social Network for Anything.

A similar service from Germany we have covered previously is Holtzbrinck’s Groops and with mixxt there is at least another direct competitor in the pipeline.

six groups is developed by the Instant Communities GmbH, they are based in Hamburg.

Company blog: six groups blog

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)