CircleUp Makes Rounding up Group Messages Easier

I wrote about CircleUp, a remarkably useful web-based service that tames the group email beast. The site has moved from alpha to beta testing stage with some new features that make it even easier to send a group a question and get a single organized response that collates all the answers in return.

It's great for anyone who knows what it's like to organize a kids' sports team, a family party, a volunteer effort, or a work project with a steady stream of multiple back-and-forth emails. CircleUp corrals the recipients' answers into a central, organized response that the organizer and the recipients can view online.

So what's new with CircleUp? The site has made it easier to send questions via email or instant message and has increased the number of ways you can view and share the answers.

A "What's Your Question?" widget box is available as a Google Desktop Gadget, a NetVibes Start Page widget, or to download as an Outlook plug-in. To check out the current widget options, click on the "tools" tab on CircleUp's home page and you'll see the start page integrations that CircleUp works with. CEO John Payne says more are on the way. Anyone can send questions from a personal myQuestions page on CirleUp, but the widget makes it easy to send it from your desktop when you're thinking about it.

To the view the results, you can now set up RSS feeds to track the progress of your questions as the answers come in without visiting the CircleUp web site. And/or you can sign up for The Daily Result—one email message at the end of the day that organizes the results of the answers and highlights who has not yet answered. Imagine: One email instead of 25.

It's also now easy to export the group results to an Excel or a PDF file.

CircleUp says some of the earliest users have been moms—school room moms and PTA members. That's no surprise since moms organize group efforts in all aspects of our lives for our kids, our friends, our work. CircleUp allows you to set up several circles or groups to organize lots of activities at once. The sign-up is simple (and free), so if you haven't given it a try yet, these beta add-ons make it a good time for a test drive. It's pretty self explanatory, but there's a video tutorial to walk you through the site, too.

Related: CircleUp: A Great Solution for Organizing Group Emails