Grou.ps adds extensive customization of discussion groups for publishers small and large

Last week I wrote about Grouply’s makeover tools for discussion groups, designed to drag 1990s-era forums into the social media age without forcing veteran members to give up their old interfaces.
Now another startup, Grou.ps, has launched its own customization tools, which the company calls Elastic Modules.
Grou.ps claims Elastic Modules go far beyond traditional skins and themes to give publishers a lot of control over how discussion groups look and work on their sites. They can add wikis, calendars and status updates to the same page that hosts discussion threads, giving participants a way to collectively memorize important information and dates.
Yet the underlying groups technology remains the same. Microsoft-turned-Google developer evangelist Don Dodge has a site that demonstrates how he can present a wiki and calendar automatically in a layout that looks like it was designed this week, not last decade.
The core idea behind Grou.ps and Grouply is that nowadays, a discussion group is just one part of a larger set of communications channels around a specific topic, rather than being the sole forum. Yet discussion groups such as Yahoo’s Coaching Hoops, where basketball coaches around the world trade tales of how to train players, often go much deeper and talk much longer on any one issue than Twitter, Facebook, or comments would ever get.
For people who feel all tweets are starting to seem the same, or who are wondering how to continue the Great Online Class Reunion prompted by Facebook, groups could be just what they don’t yet realize they’re looking for.
Grou.ps is a 10-person San Francisco-based startup founded in mid-2008 with angel money followed by a round of $1.1 million from Golden Horn Ventures, which added another $1 million this year.