New Features from Social Network Qlubb: Photo and File Sharing

Qlubb, a social network launched in August 2008 and addressed to offline groups formed in clubs around different interests and sports teams, came with improvements to its service which were announced today.
If you’re into creating and managing projects, involved in various types of community activity or just organizing events, this network could be your thing as it offers groups of users (Qlubbs) publishing and planning tools.

Qlubb’s offering includes now an increased amount of free photo sharing space of 1GB. As a community member you can also upload and download files to share with the rest of the group as well as associate those files with calendared events. Another feature added by the company is volunteer notification through which users are automatically notified of upcoming volunteer opportunities.

Here’s a Q&A interview Qlubb CEO Sophia Chiang gave Helzerman’s Odd Bits today:

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.