Squirl Launches Online Groups for Collectors

Portland, ME and Los Angeles, CA -- Squirl (http://squirl.info), the preeminent gathering place for collectors on the web, has added online groups to its already rich feature set. Groups are the first major feature to be unveiled since the site launched in August, 2006, and represent a major step forward for the site's social networking capabilities.

"We're really excited about groups," says Squirl co-founder Steve de Brun. "They are another layer of social interaction that builds upon our collecting and organizing platform. They're also a cool way to meet interesting people on Squirl outside of the context of collections and profiles."

Squirl groups are a marked improvement over similar features on either Yahoo or Google, where groups pages are both cumbersome and impersonal. In contrast, the groups pages on Squirl reflect the site's general sensibilities in that they have a simple design and clean Web 2.0 features that make navigation feel natural and instinctive.

"Any Squirl member can start a group," explains John McGrath, Squirl co-founder and moderator of the popular 'Let's Talk about Squirl' group. A group's creator can choose whether membership is open to anyone or by invitation only and can choose to have the group discussions be private or publicly viewable. Such controls are a natural extension of Squirl's privacy control features for collections.

The username of each person who posts to a group shows up as a link back to their profile page, which shows all of their collections and any personal information they have shared. Members can also post links to specific items in their collections as a means of getting advice or, perhaps, kudos from fellow enthusiasts. These simple linking features make it very easy to explore people's collections. You quickly find, for example, that the "Postcards, Postcards, and MORE Postcards!" group members also boast collections of pins, guitars, and World War II aviation memorabilia. As blogger and Squirl member Sheri Caudron put it, "Is there no end to what people find fascinating? No, in a word. No."

In the short time that it has been live, Squirl has developed a loyal and enthusiastic following. "People keep telling us that Squirl is addictive, which is music to our ears," says John McGrath. With the number of groups growing daily, it seems that groups give collectors one more reason to stay hooked on Squirl.