In online classifieds, as with any marketplace, the more buyers and sellers a company can bring together, the more listings it can generate. Oodle is about to add 1.6 million groups to its social commerce platform. Oodle is acquiring Grouply in a deal which could be announced as soon as today.
Oodle powers social classifieds on Facebook and MySpace. Now, presumably, it will offer classifieds as an option on Grouply sites as well.
Grouply is a do-it-yourself social network built on top of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. It takes those groups out of forum and mass email hell, and gives them their own sites. It competes with Ning, and in fact is trying to attract Ning refugees who don’t want to pay for that service. The deal might save the startup from having to compete with Ning.
The size of the deal is likely modest. Grouply raised a total of $2.6 million, most recently $1.3 million in January, 2008. Whereas Oodle has raised a total of $23 million. Investors in Grouply include Reid Hoffman, Jeff Clavier, and the Harvard Angel Group.