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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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!

“While Silicon Valley is the world’s hub for tech IPOs and acquisitions, we realize that it is not often that a country makes this kind of strategic technology acquisition” says Norwegian Minister of Trade and Industry Sylvia Brustad. “Norway is in a unique position due to its vast oil and gas reserves and budget surplus. The country has a made a strategic decision to foster technology innovation through strategic investment and acquisitions. Plum is a perfect fit with its founders both having Scandinavian roots, strong Silicon Valley and Boston connections and long track records of innovation and success.”

Plum Groups will be rolled out in Norwegian to every county in the country this fall in order to foster social sharing and collaboration at the grass roots level. Recent reports and criticism in the mainstream media has caused concerns among the Norwegian people and in the government about the broader societal influence of social networking. Plum is attractive due to its focus on privacy and on groups of people who already know each other.

“The Norwegian public were early adopters of the popular Facebook social networking service becoming one of the first places outside the US where Facebook took off” said Hans Peter Brøndmo, co-founder and CEO of Plum. “Norway is killing two birds with one stone with this acquisition. It is offering a more private and family oriented complement to Facebook and it is bringing an innovative social software technology start-up to its home shores”.

Plum will open an office in a new high tech office park in Oslo and Brondmo will move back to Norway and lead Plum from the Oslo office. Margaret Olson, Plum’s CTO and co-founder will spend twenty five percent of her time in Plum’s new headquarters and will lead development teams in Boston, Massachusetts and Oslo, Norway.

While Iceland has been getting a lot of attention recently as a possibly hub for cloud based computing due to its economic woes and green energy sources, Norway has been overlooked in this regard. Given it’s long history as a source of clean, hydroelectric power and cool weather, Norway is a perfect location for cloud based computing. Plum’s cloud based web service will be transitioned from Amazon Web Services to a new Norwegian eco-friendly cloud computing initiative, also sponsored by Innovation Norway, over the next two years.

For existing Plum customers and users there will be no change. This acquisition gives Plum a solid base to continue its innovation and continuing development on its existing product roadmap with a focus on online and mobile social networking for groups.

For more information or questions, please contact Innovation Norway at post@innovasjonnorge.no and Plum at info@plum.com

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.

In late 2007 when I started at Plum the interface was busy.  In the top 500×300 pixels of the site I counted no fewer than 27 elements that looked clickable.  There were tabs, arrows, expandable areas, collapsable areas, buttons and drop-downs.  All of these options gave Plum the appearance of a very complicated product.  So complicated in fact, that it was hard for new users to answer the question: What does it do?

The home page of the site contained six main groups of non-uniform navigational elements. The only thing that seemed intuitive was the search bar in the upper right; a fairly standard location and function.  Everything else seemed up for grabs during the redesign.

The first redesign attempt led to a cleaner site layout.  The header contained global navigation, a center section held user content and the right side was reserved for related information.  The navigation and interface elements, however, were still a bit jumbled.

The primary navigation consisted of Home - My Folders - People - Explore. Under this construct it was not obvious where pages like “My Profile” and “Browser Tools” should go, so they were inserted at random. Just one link out of place made an otherwise logical list seem nonsensical.

Other problems arose, too. The drop down menus were hard to click on, and were often overlooked by users.

For the next revision, drop down menus were replaced by tabs and sub links.  This was done on the premise that what is initially hidden from remains largely unused, or as Eric likes to say, users rarely change defaults.  Another product change happening around this time was the focus on time based activity (ie. a feed) which was a shift away from Plum’s old organizational structure, the Folder.

We de-emphasized folders, and brought user activity to the forefront by renaming Explore to Everyone.  Lastly we added a “Me” tab, which could serve as a parent for both user activity and user pages such as Profile and Settings.

What we still needed, in addition to a clear and concise navigation, was a paring down of interface elements.  The first to go were the view changing options.  The benefits of these toggles were being negated by the clutter they added to the site.  Next we removed the sorting options.  Again, only sometimes useful (and it turned out that no one missed them).

Our next release will introduce Private Groups.  In this version of the platform we will be removing the Friends tab.  Here, friends will be implicit and require no managing on the users part. We hope this will be a big step on the path towards the ultimate goal of having a product that is mindlessly easy to use.

• 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.