Microsoft to do for Usenet what it did for Email & The Web?

tjones2 writes "Seems like Microsoft isn't content with sad state of email these days. They now want to "make engaging with communities easier and friendlier". This means extending their reach into Usenet." Fortunately most of Usenet is such a cespool that really they can only make it better. And after cornering the market on email worms, imagine the benefits they can bring to NNTP!

Comments

usenet is ok the way it is

[havaloc]

If you know where to look, and what you are looking for, usenet is ok. It kind of has that wild west, last frontier kind of charm.
btw, if you hate having to decode stuff by hand with the various newsreaders, www.easynews.com is great for various binaries

Layers

[Craig Ringer]

Everything they're talking about there can be done locally at an NNTP server, at least as I read it, and won't affect the wider usenet. So it's more user-interface work and work on a server with a different set of design goals to the current NNTP servers.

I'm all for it. You'll need a proxy server to protect the Exchange box running the MS-NNTP server from direct access by scary things like non-Lookout news readers of course. It sounds like an interesting idea though, and perhaps some of the better / more useful ideas might propagate to other NNTP software.

Re:meh

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

I don't see this as having a major effect, most USENET users tend to run unix these days.

Isn't that the whole idea, though? Microsoft--for better or for worse--wants to open Usenet to a more mainstream audience. Clearly, making it more user-friendly and filtering out the junk would have to be the first steps.

Something tells me that Joe Averagecomputeruser will be fairly disappointed when he gets a taste of Usenet, but that's beside the point. As CmdrTaco noted in the original news post, Usenet is to a point that it can't really get much worse. Who knows? This might be one of those rare occasions when Microsoft is actually on to something.

Then again, it will probably just end up being Usenet with pretty Outlook stationery.

DecafJedi

Re:Leave us alone please.

[BWJones]

Who the hell visits usenet for news anymore?

Actually I've found that as the signal/noise ratio on sites such as Slashdot have decreased with all of the AC posting and such, usenet groups such as comp.lang. have become much more useful because the signal to noise ratio has increased significantly. On usenet, questions are answered by folks who typically know the answer rather than the pure drivel and conjecture that we are seeing more on Slashdot.