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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!
...people could find a way to hide email addresses in news groups. If they did that, then there'd be a major reduction in spam. Then maybe I'd be able to reuse 1 of my email addresses.
testing out my trending skills
if usenet was supposed to be friendly it would have been designed that way :-)
Seriously, usenet is supposed to be distributed and resiliant to poor communications and have no choke points that would slow operation. All of the MS ideas would seem to introduce complication, choke points and remove much of the resiliance.
Hey Microsoft, what did you innovate today?
What will the effect be on groups.google.com be if Microsoft begins to take over Usenet?
Personally, I don't even use a normal newsreader program, but just peruse using google. I find the info I want (typically tech help on linux) and then that's it. You can even post to newsgroups through google.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
This is very bad news for Usenet. In the beginning, USEnet was a haven for people with the persistence and intelligence necessary to figure out how to use it, and it was good. Flamewars were minimal, people were respectful, and knowledge flowed freely. Then AOL, WebTV, and their ilk came along and lowered the barriers to entry. The quality of discussion went down, the quantity went up, and USEnet became a lot less USEful than it had been. I feel like that situation has improved slightly, at least in the text-only discussion groups. But if MS makes it possible for every dingbat melonhead with a modem to get on it, it's going to get much worse.
I'm probably being elitist, but I like it when it takes a little effort and intelligence to be able to participate in a discussion. I know that the people on a newsgroup are at least slightly more advanced (usually) than their ICQ-going friends, and that better discussions will result.
The other thing is that USEnet has (so far) been flying below the **AA's radar as far as file sharing and software IP ifringement go. If they all of a sudden turn their attention towards it, USEnet is easy prey for a takedown: the servers are centralized machines that are easily traceable to a company or individual, and most ISPs would probably just take theirs down rather than fight it out with the RIAA. Of course, the user uproar would be like nothing we've ever seen before, because USEnet's main use is not only non-infringing, it's incredibly valuable to a lot of technical types out there.
Google already does this to a certain degree, although I don't know if their Activity ranking takes into account replies to topics or just number of messages or what.
If you look at the Google Groups listings you'll see a rough measure of their activity as shown by a green bar. For example, if you look at the rec.arts.comics.* hierarchy you'll see rac.xbooks has no activity. And sure enough, if you go to that group you'll see 2 posts from 2003, 8 from 2002, and a handful of older ones. rac.european has an almost full bar and looking there shows 5-10 posts each month. The others have completely full bars showing lots of posts each day.
Maybe Google should explain better how the Activity rating works; I didn't see a mention in the faq. Or perhaps show more detail than just the green bar.
What would happen is you load all the posts into a database and perform analysis on that data. From there you draw conclusions on the pretext that, if there were a lot of replies and a lot of repeats last week on newsgroup X, then that should continue this week, so that might be a good one to go for info.
Once they get the ball rolling on this though, I'd be willing to bet they try to "update" USENET as they become a major player there. Maybe that's just pessimism on my part though.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
1) Content-related query and aggregate presentation of feeds, rather than simple 'feed'->'group' organization
2) Intelligent filtering based on my interests (e.g. the kinds of messages I have chosen to read before), not just a simple kill-file / watch mechanism
3) Better integration of links and web content (the kind of thing you're seeing in Outlook 2003 / good RSS aggregators)
4) Tools to help with the end-user integration of threaded news content into other apps (e.g. InfoPath-like tools)
No reason any of these things couldn't be done (beyond the fact that two in particular would require the kind of R&D effort that currently goes in to spam filters - the first half of this sort of equation). Forms of 1, 3 and 4 are already available in Outlook 2003, only it doesn't integrate news feeds into the experience. Hence, I guess, MS stated intention to make news a first class citizen in this world.
I work for the company with the world's largest installation of NNTP on MS Exchange. We've been having problems with scaling, and have been hinting to MS that we're thinking about switching to Linux. I find it both interesting and telling that the response is not to fix the technical issues we're having on the server side, but to add more chrome to the client side.
I think Google's contribution is more in the area of availability and searchability (if that is a word ;-)) of postings. If I remember a discussion that was in one of my subscribed groups in the recent X days (X being the time before messages are deleted), I'm usually quicker just full text searching in my news client than going to Google Groups. But I don't have 700 million+ postings, and I guess my news client wouldn't scale well to that number if I did.
If I find interesting discussions on Google Groups that have more than 10 postings and are likely to still be on my news server, I always get the messages to read them with my news client. Way more comfortable.
Yes, and Microsoft has already polluted that. Or probably diluted, I should say.
There ought to be either a comp.sys.microsoft or perhaps a new sub-hierarchy comp.vendor.microsoft.*. Instead, you get all this top-level microsoft.* nonsense. And then, of course, every 'me too' sheep of a vendor follows suit, so there's now borland.*, symantec.*....ugh. You're computer or computer software vendors, you belong in the comp.* hierarchy, not at the top level.
Cheers,
Ian
In August 1996, Microsoft made their internal microsoft.* hierarchy available to the world at large. Around that same time, they switched from INN v1.4 to a proprietary MS NNTP server.
For the next few weeks, every post made to microsoft.* and select other groups was duplicated by msnews.microsoft.com and spewed back to the world because the proprietary MS server changed the Message-ID for every post. Message-IDs are supposed to be unique, so an altered ID was seen as a new post by servers peering with MS and thus were not treated as duplicates and dropped.
Thousands and thousands of posts were duped and spewed by Microsoft's "innovative" server, both inside microsoft.* and out. The reaction among news admins ranged from mild chuckles at Microsoft's expense to blind rage and the use of cancelbots.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I could use a good laugh.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Are you kidding? The whole reason why everybody thinks the Linux community is full of elitist is because of usenet! IRC and usenet happen to be the last places with Linux elitists. And where do newbies go look for help? IRC and usenet.
Exactly: it's great, but only if you know where to look. Sounds as though Microsoft's ideas on this one are steps in the right direction. I'm a Usenet veteran, but still find it difficult to identify a group that's relevant to me when I first want to explore a new subject.
For bonus marks, if they could just get people to understand that it's polite to read the FAQ before posting (and make the FAQ an obvious link somewhere) and that following local customs and keeping on-topic also go a long way, they'd be ahead of everyone else who currently offers Usenet access. A group with influence of Microsoft could do a lot to improve the signal/noise ratio on some newsgroups. Extending their reach into Usenet isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Ill-informed editorial comments like Taco's don't help much, BTW. Most newsgroups actually are pretty good these days, as long as there's one where your interest is on-topic and you have decent filtering in your client to cut out the noise. I've found worthwhile groups on various technical subjects, all of my major hobbies, my local area and more. We can do without putting off people who might be genuinely interested in reading and/or contributing to such groups with juvenile statements like Taco's.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
From the rumors we've heard about Microsoft dumping tons of money into improving their search engine, and integrating it into the next version of Windows, I don't think the "Google has already done this" argument is going to slow them down.
While Linux is probably Microsoft's number one threat in the business world, I would guess sites like Google (privately held) are close to the top of the list on the home front. There's a lot of power to be had if you can funnel millions of internet users through your search engine or portal. This is what Microsoft is trying to do.
If they can clue the masses into Usenet in such a way that users think that they need Microsoft software in order to do Usenet, they'll control millions of people's access to Usenet, and to some degree Usenet itself.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Microsoft's Outlook-based newsreader has a means of auto-detecting UU-encoded postings. Unfortunately it is an incredibly stupid method that simply checks for the presence of the word "begin" at the start of a line, followed by two spaces, which can cause all kinds of problems. Rather than fix such a grevious and utterly stupid error, Microsoft has offered the workaround "tell people not to have non UU-encoded postings with that line in it".
Brilliant. Also typical Microsoft. Tell the rest of the world to accomidate their stupidity.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
So what's wrong with some elitism. Internet mail, usenet and IRC all came from the UNIX world. They were developed by geeks for geeks. Linux has nothing to do with it. I was using them first on a VAX mainframe. It appears that it's Linux elitist because generally users with clue use Linux on their home machines. But having said that I know plenty of windows users who hate top posting, insufficient trimming of quotes and the like. This is because they started on line using DOS and such practices were highly inconvenient when using DOS too. The elitism comes from those who used the net in the early days and those who have got the AOL CD on the door mat. It's a lack of understanding which can be sorted with polite education.
Why change usenet? It doesn't need changing. It works.
Usenet is like a mass of pubs. Some pubs you like, others you don't. Some are the olde worlde pubs that sell real ale, others sell mass produced beer and you can buy chip butties, others are more like wine bars and others are where the lager louts hang out. If you don't like your local you go somewhere else, you don't try and change it.
I am subscribed to several groups. We are all types of users, some newbies, some not. There are strict rules about the groups laid down in the group's charter. It's only twats who leap in without lurking for a while and who haven't read the charter who get stick. Usually they are helped politely first and it's only if they are beligerant do they get hassled. Most of the time the groups are nice happy families.
You wouldn't go to a pub and leap in to conversations without testing the water. So why do it on line.
Many have pointed out why Microsoft turning it's attention to the long-neglected usenet could be a bad thing. However, there are some possible benefits to it too...
First of all, Usenet apps are currently quite stagnant. There are new apps out there, but Agent is still considered one of the best and there haven't been any major changes to it in years. The interface is practically the same as it was 5 years ago! If Microsoft enters the news-reader market in a serious way then perhaps it might stimulate some creativity and development elsewhere. If nothing else, at least Usenet will get some publicity and new users. This is the big thing.
Currently, for most people, pay-for Usenet services are the only way to get good feeds at present. With more demand for Usenet from consumers and support from Microsoft perhaps ISP's will take their Usenet servers more seriously. Usenet is a valuable source for thousands of topics, but it is also a great repository for a weath of high-bandwidth materials such as porn, pirated music, videos, etc.. This is stuff that most ISP's don't really care about their users downloading except for the gawd-awful bandwidth costs they incur. A good Usenet server being used by users instead of P2P apps will actually reduce a lot of backbone traffic since the latest copy of Eminenema's album that everybody and their dog is downloading will only have to go over the backbone once to the news-server. From there it's all internal network traffic. Less bandwidth = lest cost, and cheaper internet access, not to mention more speed on less congested lines.
See. There's a silver lining in every cloud, even if it's a MS-sheitstorm.
...For E-mail and the Web? Let's have a look.
They've encouraged pollution of E-mail with HTML and rich text that's readable only on a client that can interpret the code. I mean, c'mon... If you can't get your message across using well-written sentences in plain ASCII text, then no amount of coloration, fancy fonts, or flashing widgets are going to help.
They've done a lot, both in the past and more recently, that bends or outright breaks W3C Consortium open standards. Granted, they've gotten a little better, but how many web sites still have interactive features that only work if you use IE? And how many have that stupid "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" blurb at the bottom? How are Flash animations and fancy graphics going to help a vision-impaired or outright blind user, who depends on text-to-speech software or simple high-contrast colors, find what they need on the web?
Outlook (known among myself and many of my friends as 'Lookout Distress') is still one of the best virus carriers on the planet. Only Microsoft would come up with an E-mail client insecure enough that it seems almost to have been designed expressly to aid virus and worm transmission.
And now UncaBill and Steve "Uncle Fester" Ballmer want to try and "Ballmerize" (my word -- like it?) Usenet? Sheesh... With their track records, they'll probably try (and, hopefully, fail miserably) to borg the whole thing into one big "Web Experience" that will be "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer" all over again.
As others have so accurately pointed out, Usenet is fine the way it is. Noisy, a bit tough to navigate, and definitely a place where you would want to have your Nomex undies handy to grab at a moment's notice, but perfectly usable to those of us who CARE ENOUGH ABOUT IT to LEARN how to use it right.
Speaking for myself, I think I can say, with confidence, that Balmy should leave Usenet to those who know it best: The admins around the world who carry it, and the thousands of users who make it a most interesting place indeed.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Well, Microsoft (and Bill Gates) _did_ use Usenet in the past: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8642%40micros oft.UUCP&output=gplain. And Bill is posting from another guy's account. :-))
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
There is far better software out there for dealing with Usenet than Microsofts stuff.
I think Microsofts problem is that they are viewing the world thru the software they make and as such are really quite blind as to what is already available. So when they come up with some improvement, they really don't know it was done a decade ago or better and actually think they invented something new.
What is Usenet good for?
establishing Prior art for one....
Ive always used the usenet to see what type of usenet/internet activity a so-called 'Internet experienced' applicant has had on usenet.
Ive always thought that slashdot would be well served if it somehow made its threads synch up with a moderated alt.slashdot so that all discussions/info can be accessed though a news reader, and be archived globally if (heaven forbit) slashdot ever goes away.
If they can clue the masses into Usenet in such a way that users think that they need Microsoft software in order to do Usenet, they'll control millions of people's access to Usenet, and to some degree Usenet itself.
If that were true, AOL would've controlled Usenet a long time ago.
Furthermore, MSN is the default startup homepage on 90% or 95% or whatever of browsers, and yet Google rules the web search.
Sheesh, you'd think you hadn't heard of the ASSTR, the alt.sex.stories text repository! More text porn than you can shake your rotting grogan-choad at! (No, it's not actually related to alt.tasteless. I don't even think they say "choad" or "grogan" in there.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca