Nexo: Groups with personalization, widgets & more

By Vivek | January 30th, 2007 at 11:38 am ET         

Nexo is taking the idea of social networking, and personalization and applying them to a very basic form of interaction which was always the target - Groups. Instead of having your own page, painstakingly customizing it, and than connecting with your friends on the site to form a network, at Nexo you start off with groups itself. Being able to create a sharing and collaboration platform easily with the ability to customize the look and feel is what was missing from most of the social networking or group based platforms. Launched last year, Nexo was co-founded by Craig Jorasch, CEO, Nexo, who has previously the co-founder and Chairman of Octopus Software, an internet mash-ups and interactivity platform. Octopus was bought by Ask.com in 2001. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Metropolis Software, one of the first developers of sales force automation software. Metropolis Software was sold to Clarify Software in 1996.

Feature list at Nexo is pretty exhaustive that provides a wide range of group functionality including shared calendars, forums, tasks, blogs, and much more. You can startup quickly by choosing one of the standard site templates for your group that range from sports, family, . Content that you can add to your group pages can include Images, Videos, Widgets, Polls, Widgets…. Among the couple of things that I really like about Nexo is the security built around the content. You can have add privacy and access control into every lots of aspects and determine precisely who can view and change content at any level.

Other aspect of Nexo, which I really liked, is related to widgets which we all know if going to greatly impact the way larger social networking sites monetize their operations. Nexo has an open architecture allows users to add their own widgets and themes to completely customize their online group’s function and style. As compared to this, larger players including MySpace and Bebo are planning to go slow and be secretive about their widget plans while selectively shutting off few of them. Personally I feel that open platforms like Nexo can sound to very attractive to users who want to avoid all the hassles of their widgets being shut down without notice.

Coming back to Nexo, I think within a few minutes of playing around with the site you would feel that Nexo is the right place to organize group based activity. As part of future plans Nexo will enable local photo uploads, release number of more templates, and open up its API pretty early to go in for content mashups that makes it a much more attractive destination. We should definitely see some activity from the Google Groups team who have been pretty active lately on adding new features.

Links:
Nexo