posted
I was browsing on google today, and I noticed a new option called "groups."
Their site says:
quote: Google Groups is a free online community and discussion group service that offers the Web's most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings (more than a billion messages).
Has anyone tried this? I am not sure how this is different from message boards or blogs. Can anyone explain it better? I thought we had groups already, but like a boy in a new gaming store, I want to have everything that new. lol
Posts: 2445 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
USENET has been around a long time -- longer than the word-wide-web, IIRC. Usenet articles are passed around in an ancient, distributed network. It can take several hours from when one person posts a USENET article to when it is available to everybody.
Back in the day, there was a web site called Deja News which did its best to archive all the USENET posts and make them searchable.
Then Deja News went under.
Then Google bought them.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Huh. I wonder why they are marking it new? They've actually had it for quite a while. I used to use it to search Usenet, once I lost access to my Unix account that had the newsreaders on it. That was several years ago.
*thinks* Does anyone remember who had the Usenet archives before Google did? I know Google bought them from someone else, but I can't remember who.
Anyway. Yes, obviously I have used them. Google Groups is really an interface to Usenet newsgroups. The biggest difference between Usenet and a message board is that a message board is hosted on one site, whereas newsgroup messages are sent to Usenet servers all over the world, and you then use a newsreader program which connects to a Usenet server to read messages on your local machine. Not all servers carry all newsgroups.
There are some advantages to Usenet over a message board. For one thing, you can block users. I used to killfile users who would send the same spam over and over, or those who I simply found annoying. Also, newsgroups tend to be very specific in topic, and a good newsgroup will have a good signal-to-noise ratio. The newsgroups I followed a lot, rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, were exceptionally good with signal-to-noise, especially the former.
Farmgirl: unless they've added something different, it's nothing like Yahoo! Groups. Yahoo! Groups are actually mailing lists that can also be read on Yahoo!
Posts: 1805 | Registered: Jun 1999
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quote:Back in the day, there was a web site called Deja News which did its best to archive all the USENET posts and make them searchable.
Then Deja News went under.
Then Google bought them.
Ah! Thanks, mph. I was memfaulting on Deja News' name. But yes, I remember using them, and remember when Google bought them out. Posts: 1805 | Registered: Jun 1999
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posted
Okay, I just took another look at it. It looks like they are combining their old Google Groups, which searched Usenet, with a new service which will be similar to Yahoo! Groups. Two seperate things, but it does make sense to group them, I think.
If you have a Gmail account, you can create your own Group. I didn't play with it enough to see if it would be set up like a Usenet group, but the site did say that if it was public, it would be searchable, along with the Usenet groups.h
Posts: 1805 | Registered: Jun 1999
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posted
Google has has "Google Groups Beta" for a long time. Today, they switched over to "Google Groups", which seems to be not as useful to me as the beta version. The beta version has been around for a couple or three years.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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