Grouptivity trying to build "Digg for e-mail"

Grouptivity CEO Ankesh Kumar has a plan to help you monetize the "E-mail This" button on your blog. A plug-in available for Wordpress or Movable Type installations, the Grouptivity version of the function starts with the expected behavior: It lets users e-mail items to their friends. See previous story: Grouptivity and Social Bookmarking.

Users also get a discussion forum for each article they send or receive, and a page that aggregates all their Grouptivity traffic.

Unlike other E-mail This buttons, the Grouptivity tool sends the story to a public repository, a Digg-like site called iPond. On this site, users can see what the most e-mailed items are from all of Grouptivity's users. iPond also helps a bit with SEO for the sites that use it, since it's a giant page of links that, hopefully, will get used by a lot of people.

E-mail addresses of senders and receivers are not revealed on iPond, thank goodness.

Kumar says that the users on the New York Times' site send 50,000 "E-mail this" articles a day. If that's accurate, adding some new functionality to this operation makes a lot of sense. However, I have no idea how the company is going to get people to use the iPond site; as useful as it might become, I don't think people are going to flock to yet another directory page, especially in the short term when the Grouptivity network is still forming.

See also: Clickability.