Six Groups: “one community on the go please”

When you own a blog, you’re probably always looking for ways to create a bond with your readers. If your readers feel connected to you, they’ll probably comment and read more. Not to mention the power of word of mouth. A good way to create this sort of commitment is an integrated social network. There are several WordPress plugins offering extra functions with a social network feel to it, yet it takes a lot of time, knowledge and effort to modify them to your needs. So I’m glad to tell you a new start-up has come along which offers an instant community for your convenience.

Patrick, Andreas Stephan from Six Groups, and undersigned

German-based Six Groups has developed an easy tool that allows you to include a community by just copy/pasting a javascript snippet. This adds a bar at the top of your page, showing a community lifestream, the number of users that are online and a sign-up button. You can customize the design by selecting a theme. As a user you have access to the regular social networks features, like a wall, lifestream and a personal library for photos and text documents. All in all, it’s a pretty neat community solution for bloggers and site owners who don’t have the budget for a totally-customized social network.

I met the Six Groups founders last night at the Facebook Developer Garage after party in Hamburg. They’re presenting at the Next08 conference today and already have an alpha version of their tool running on the Next08 site (So check that one out). When I was talking to co-founder Andreas Stephan, I immediately started thinking about the “yet another sign-up page”-tiredness. I’ve signed up to enough social networks already. So I said to him I’d only blog about his start-up if he promised to support OpenID. He did, so let’s see whether Six Groups lives up to it.