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.
Oh, iPhone. You had us at ‘gesture to unlock.’ We’re unabashed admirers of the iPhone interface. That makes us … and a few million other folks.
Beyond swooning, though, we were determined to bring group communication to that revolutionary device in a way that no one has done before; to bring ‘Groups 2.0′ to the iPhone. Over that past several months, determination became action. And action became labor. Which briefly became hunger (lunch). Then quickly back to labor. Until finally…
The NEW Plum Groups iPhone application
It’s available right now (the link leads directly to the app on the iTunes store). We already have some enhancements lined up, but we couldn’t wait to share our excitement. Consider it an advanced preview.
Features include:
- access to all the content from all of your Plum groups
- share photos to private groups of people
- post status and comments
- quick access to what specific friends have posted
- switch between conversations easily and seamlessly
Plum is all about the close-knit groups of people in your real life. The new Plum Groups iPhone app is incredibly useful for these groups to stay in touch. At Plum we have all set up our own private family groups, we have groups for sharing and chatting within the company and we have groups with friends. Since downloading the iPhone app people in these groups have become even more active.
Group communication shouldn’t be tethered to the desktop. That’s why Plum is committed to a mobile group experience that enables your close-knit friends and family to stay connected on-the-go. The Plum Groups iPhone app is just one of our many mobile initiatives to bring this to fruition.
Please download the app today and send us your feedback.
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!
Plum Groups is live. Our goal with this release is to make the whole groups category a bit more social. We are focused on making it really quick and easy to set up a private (or public) Plum Group.
You can set up a Plum Group in less than a minute. Invite friends, family, co-workers, team members, classmates… you decide.
Your Plum Groups come with lots of neat features and are easy to use. For instance:
- Decide whether your group is private or public
- Invite people to join you
- Post status updates and leave comments
- Share links, photos, videos, notes, documents and more
- Check out what others are doing in your group activity feed
- Set up more Plum groups for other people in your life
Click here to set up your own groups and start sharing and connecting with the different groups of people you care about.
Or perhaps you want to make your site more social? Click here to explore becoming a Plum partner and using our white-labels social platform to create community and social activity on your site.
Plum is now live with a big new update to the service. This has been in the works for a while and we’re excited about it going live. Some of the highlights:
- New navigation. We have improved the user interface with simpler navigation.
- Status updates with fun emoticons.
- Fully search engine optimized for all public posts.
- Import your contacts from Google or Yahoo Mail, making it easy to invite friends.
- Easy access to prior profile pictures.
…and much more. Try it out and let us know what you think.
