Plum Inc. is a social media messaging platform that’s been around for some time, offering social media components for publishers that would like to add semi-customizable social features to their websites. Today, Plum is revealing Plum Groups, which is a ready-made solution for multiple people to access a shared web space for messaging, updates, comments, and sharing media.

This Groups update comes in light of all the other changes we’re seeing across larger social networks, specificaly those, like Facebook, that have opening platforms. Options like Facebook Connect provide some semblance of immediate connectivity in the social sense, without a publisher needing to add their own social components or networking features on their own. The iea with Plum Groups is to offer a similar ability to connect with those a user already knows, as the Groups tab is actually replacing the Friends tab on Plum’s products.

The idea of adding Groups is also being used as a way for an individual to broadcast updates and content to others within the group. With this update, Plum is targeting family, office teams, schools and friends. The idea with Plum Groups is to allow multiple types of groups to be available for a given user. This implies that Plum will have tools for managing multiple groups from a single account as well.

Individuals that would like to create a group on Plum’s website can do so for free, whereas sites that would like to add Group components can take advantage of Plum’s business options. Competing more directly with sites like Ning or KickApps, Plum’s offering also comes during a time when the idea of offering internal networking options to consumers and end users is an attractive option for site publishers.

I think in the future we’ll need to see many of these third party social platforms have ready-integration with the larger platforms such as Facebook Connect, especially as many sites looking for social capabilities are also looking towards growth which can be achieved in leveraging existing social graphs on Facebook. However, we’re still seeing a good deal of ongoing development for all social media platforms, so time will tell how best to integrate such features for the best use by businesses and individuals.