Mark Fletcher is the online startup genius who created and developed two major online products that have revolutionized the way that people use the internet. Bloggers and web journalists around the world are wondering whether he has done it again with the new startup company called SnapGroups.

Before Yahoo! Groups, there was no easy way for a large set of people to remain in frequent communication via email. Fletcher built the first service that would allow them to do so, and sold it to Yahoo! for $400 million. Now Yahoo! Groups and similar products are being used by friends, relatives, advocates of particular causes, enthusiasts of different interests and even by large corporations.

Termed “e-groups,” these are not just shared mailing lists that can be accessed through a single email address. They also keep archives, provide group reminders, and even host files and photos for the group.

Later, Mark Fletcher built Bloglines, the former leading RSS reader, and sold it to Ask.com. Bloglines offered user-driven syndication for the first time. The product currently allows people to subscribe to RSS-feeds of different periodical or frequently updated websites. Bloglines and other RSS readers are now used to push RSS documents to various mobile devices as well.

For Fletcher, the future of communications online is in groups. SnapGroups will focus on real-time group communication. There are plans to integrate with social media giants Twitter and Facebook. SnapGroups can be made public or shared among a select group of users, with the ability to add and remove users from the groups as they go along. Unlike with online forums, users won’t have to deal with unwanted headers, links, graphics, and ads.
With so many and such versatile forms of social communication already out there, it doesn’t really seem like there’s a need for any more of them. But with a track record like that of Mark Fletcher, SnapGroups isn’t one that can be ignored.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Startups.