Today it was announced that Plum has been acquired by Nokia in an asset sale. We will join Nokia’s Social Location unit.
We have come a long way since 2004 when we made our first “napkin sketch” on a sailboat. Today, Plum Groups is a service for those of us that want to share the more private parts of our lives with smaller groups of people we are close to such as family and friends. It fills the need need for “private” sharing and conversations.
We can’t talk about what we will be doing as a part of Nokia yet. Rest assured that Plum Groups continues to operate unchanged. We would like to thank our loyal users for helping us reach this important milestone and look forward to continue on this exciting journey with you.
As of this afternoon, Plum may just speak your language. At least if you are an English, Spanish, German, French, Italian or Finnish speaker.
Plum Groups in Finnish
But that’s not all. We have been busy making many other big improvements as well.
When Apple launched its new operating system OS 10.6 – Snow Leopard - recently, there was a lot of talk about how it was a “maintenance release” or “service pack” rather than a real upgrade with cool new features.
It takes confidence to spend a year on making core improvements like Apple just did, rather than adding new features. As we were putting together this post about our latest Plum releases we realized that there was a nice parallel here to our most recent efforts. For several months now we have been hard at work on some important updates that are best categorized as infrastructure improvements and streamlining.
Our latest updates, released over the last few weeks, have been very focused on improving some of the core parts of our service. Here is a short summary:
- Becoming a Plummer just became a lot simpler - setting up or joining a group for your family or friends has never been easier. Every part of our sign up and join flows have been reviewed and tested for ease of use. We even took out that pesky confirmation email you had to click on in order to get going. (We still send you an email, but you can validate it at your leisure now).
- Inviting Group members from other groups is now one-click easy – Once you’ve set up a few groups you’ll be connected to a bunch of people. Those people now automatically show up whenever you’re on the invite page. Just check them off and hit invite and they’ll receive an email invitation to join your group.
- Better messages and instructions throughout – We have greatly improved the explanations and messages you get throughout Plum making it easier for new group members to understand what’s going on.
- Performance improvements galore - lots of small and big improvements to performance throughout.
- New themes, improves settings pages, Twitter control on a per-group basis (for your public groups only) and much more.
Try it out. People of all ages and backgrounds are using the Plum Groups service. With this latest release it’s easier than ever to set up a group for your family, small group of friends, your church, your sports team or for a team at work.
Oh, and have you tried Plum Groups for iPhone yet? It’s the perfect way to stay in touch with the small groups of people you really care about while you’re on the go.
Going on a trip this summer? Traveling with family or friends. If so check out Travel Groups a joint effort between ViaMichelin (the people behind the famed Michelin Guides) and Plum. Travel Groups is an implementation of Plum Groups specifically targeted at small groups of people taking a trip together.
Set up a private or public group for your trip(s). It takes only a minutes to register and set up a travel group. Once it’s up you can invite the people you’re traveling with and voila you’ve got your own private space to share and discuss anything and everything relating to the trip. Here are some of the things you can do:
- Set up one or more groups for trips, week-end getaways or as a place to discuss your family plans
- Invite only the people you want to join
- Post status updates, web links, photos, videos, notes and documents
- Write silly comments or have serious discussions
- Get an email notification whenever someone post something to your group (don’t worry you can turn email notices off in the settings section if you start getting too many)
- Drag and drop a button into your browser toolbar so you can post any web page to your group, including your itineraries, hotel pages, photos from photo sharing sites and much, much more.
- You can even make folders where you can share things with select people in the group.
Besides the English version Travel Groups is also available in French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
This week we put up a new page for the Plum Groups iPhone App. It lists the features Plum iPhone App, shows some screenshots and links users to the iTunes store so they can grab it. The app is FREE. Click here to grab yours now.
Plum Groups iPhone App in the iTunes App Store
We released a bunch of fun and useful improvements to Plum Groups this week. Here are some highlights:
- Cool new selection of themes for your groups (see below).
- Email Alerts notifying group members as soon as something is posted. This feature is automatically turned on for closed groups. If you want to turn it off just go to your settings page and set “Group activity emails” to “Never”.
- Instant posts. Things show up immediately in the activity feed.
- Comments in the group activity feed.
- Better link handling. Posting a link now grabs the page title for you.
- Clickable links in status updates and comments.
- … and many other small improvements too.
This week’s update to Plum Groups sports fun, new themes. Choose Blue Clouds….
or Green Grass…
And may other choices too. Access the new themes from the “Manage Group” link in the upper right. Note: Only Group creators / administrators can change the theme for a group.
As always, send us your feedback, comments, suggestions and input. Enjoy!
