Social Network Qlubb adds photo and file sharing
Qlubb, a social network targeted at offline groups such as book clubs and sports teams, announced new features today including photo and file sharing. The network, which launched in August of this year, provides groups of users, or Qlubbs, with publishing and planning tools that can be used to manage projects, prepare for events, or engage in other types of community activity. As part of today’s 
announcement the company is increasing the amount of free photo sharing space to 1GB per Qlubb. Community members will also be able to upload and download files to share with the rest of the group as well as associate those files with calendared events. The company also announced volunteer notification, a feature that will automatically notify users of upcoming volunteer opportunities.
In a Q&A with Helzerman’s Odd Bits, Qlubb CEO Sophia Chiang discussed today’s announcement and the competitive landscape for location-based social networks.
What is the most popular feature on Qlubb today and why do you think users will be excited about file sharing?
I think the most popular features on Qlubb today are the online sign-up sheets and calendar reminders. The hardest part about organizing groups is the scheduling and delegation of tasks to members. With Qlubb’s online sign-up sheets and automatic reminders, the back-and-forth of emails and scheduling is virtually eliminated, and the “nagging” and reminding of people of their tasks and events are all handled by Qlubb. We have many members who love the ability to set up all of the events for the year and let the reminders guide everyone on when they need to take action. All the overhead is taken care of upfront.
As a veteran school and community leader, I am very excited about the new file sharing and photo functionality. Nearly all groups produce documents to support its various activities and events. These documents (flyers, handbooks, newsletters, permission slips, brochures) are often associated with a group event. With our new file and photo sharing functionality, Qlubb gives group members that ability to categorize and store files by calendar date or event - making retrieval and reference SO much easier and much more intuitive.
So instead of telling a fellow parent ” please filter through the 20 documents online and find permission_slip_08-10-12.pdf, uploaded on 08-09-10″, with the new Qlubb capability the parent could just go to the event “field trip to pumpkin patch” and see the file “permission_slip.pdf” on the calendar and associated with the date.
Do you have any opinion on new neighborhood-based social networks?
I think there is a need for them, but the challenge is to build a neighborhood-social network that has something more in common than just a zip code. There has to be a reason for people to go on to share and connect - it could be a network concerned about the school system, or a neighborhood watch program, or parenting. In a given zip code there are many types of people with different interests, and so these neighborhood sites need to create a common thread across all these groups - which I believe is difficult.
The addition of a section for volunteering opportunities seems to place Qlubb in direct competition with some pretty big volunteering sites such as VolunteerMatch. Do you see them as competitors?
Our ability to more easily publicize volunteering opportunities are within the group as opposed to publishing volunteer opportunities for the world to see, thus VolunteerMatch is not a competitor to Qlubb. Qlubb is about giving existing real-life groups a place on the web to communicate, organize and get stuff done. We believe VolunteerMatch is about finding people to help and so it’s really an individual recruitment service.
What would you like for people to know about Qlubb?
Qlubb is about how to help real-life groups communicate and work more efficiently and effectively. We originally started Qlubb to help parents to be more involved and active in their children’s lives. But over time, we have found Qlubb to be useful to a much wider swath of people - just about any group of people who communicate, share and work together. By giving groups a centralized place to congregate online and that is so simple to use that anyone can figure it out, members can easily contribute and participate in their groups. After only a few months, Qlubb users are seeing significant increases in user participation and significant reduction in email and miscommunication.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 6:30 am and is filed under News, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
