Today, the Google Groups team launched a new beta version, available to anyone at groups-beta.google.com. It may have been awhile since you thought of Groups as cool or sexy — if you ever did — but I couldn’t have been more excited to work on the team responsible for making the current Google Groups better.
Google Groups is the old Usenet rendered as web pages.
In many subjects it competes with Blogs for comment, criticism and content.
It is one of the really big online channels for communication and this has potential. It is quite MySpace in its way.
I remember doing 'usability focus groups' on the old usenet to see what people thought. One of the biggest barriers was issues such as 'flaming' and not sufficiently welcoming 'newbies' - you see I have to use jargon to explain it, and it was jargon that put people off. It's not too different to the blogosphere today where mistakes aren't tolerated and the blogging purists what it to be by their rules. They don't actually want more and more 'ordinary' people to participate.
ReplyDeleteThe usenet battle was lost to the geeks, I think the blogging battle will be won by the rest of us - both David and me are both normal people and geeks ;)