thanks! yep, its all php and mysql. we imagine 'orgu' means something like organization-universe or (you guessed it) organization-university, but in reality we wanted to pick as short a name as possible so groups using the .orgu.com subdomains wouldn't have a long url.

we wrote it from scratch

if you have a wildcard in dns records, you can effectively make it a fallback, so thats how our something.orgu.com addresses get mapped to an IP. however, we do allow tld's, we handle that by hosting our own instance of PowerDNS, which is great (u can use mysql with it)

we use your f+lname as your identity when you post things and invite other people to the site. the point about the confusion over the sn field is valid, we might want to reformat that screen (or ideally have a live demo that eases into a real membership - like weebly).

we use the same java/activex image uploader that facebook uses (hoping people would be familiar w/ it). however, there should be an option "use the simple uploader" that will take u to a standard file-input setup. let me know if this isnt showing up.

we're not so much in the 'group communication' space as the 'web publishing' space. our main goal is to make interesting/useful/rich websites (though we may harness group communication for content). we want these websites to be valuable for those within the group AND mean something for those outside.

thats a really good point, thanks. i was just looking at 37signals' backpack homepage and they handle this pretty well. might do something similar

ideally we would have a 'live demo' but our current architecture makes this tough. this is 1st on our list though.

even though we have launched, we aren't trying to attract major pr yet. we want to beef up a few features a little more first, but when we do, we're thinking (besides announcing on the standard internet portals) to talk to some large national organizations (greek, community, etc). there is no paid version, but you CAN currently use your own domains for free. (in the "settings" tab)

it was actually painfully hard. we ended up with a very elegant solution though... Blogger has a set of widgets, but we introduce some new ones (like a 'Photos' widget or an 'Events' widget). These sort of inherit from existing ones (by transforming their templates), so designers only have to code html+css for the standard 'Blog' widget and the others are inferred

btw, we had to make a custom blogger xml interpreter from scratch

Thanks for the info. Now I have an urge to create an open source standard for site themes based on Blogger templates or something else. Some things might be too specific (like the way a typical blog is formated) but lots of the elements could certainly be constructed in a way that they'd be interchangeable across totally different kinds of sites. Maybe Google Gadgets addresses part of this problem. Hmmm...

oh yeah... we are aware of a possible naming conflict with orgoo.com, so we're thinking about rebranding. any suggestions for new names would be appreciated.

groupingtogether.com is available if you want to go in a more real word direction.

SiteForYour.Org is also available.

Overall it looks good. You might want to put a live admin demo up so that a site visitor is one click away from seeing what the admin interface looks like.