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New Google Groups in Beta
qwe writes "Google has apparently launched a new version of their Google Groups, currently in beta. It looks a lot like Gmail. One can attach a star to message threads. One can even create new groups, although they aren't actual Usenet groups."
And if you have a Gmail account you already have a login for the Google groups.
... very old.
http://labs.google.com, check it out. The Google groups Bata have been oublic for a while now.
And Orkut too, btw.
That wasn't Delphi that Google bought... it was Deja (formerly known as DejaNews) who they aquired.
I've generally been pretty satisfied with Google's treatment of the old Dejanews archive. Dejanews was *great* while it existed. You didn't have to be "registered" to post to USEnet in the early stages of its existence, the "author profile" feature was always really fun, and it featured well-thought-out article tracking and thread handling. Deja.com was something else entirely (one of the strangest company metamorphosis ever, really) yet the few months post-Deja and pre-Google were really nightmarish--I didn't realize what a resource Usenet archives could be until they weren't around.
Google's first version of "Groups" was very bare-bones, yet while its innovations were sound--in particular, Google's search function was far superior, and its extended-to-early-1980s-archive was a delight--it dropped several features that made Dejanews so much fun. And while Google insisted that it was going to gradually revamp its Groups UI, it never really did so.
Google's big holdout (and one which they apparently were originally intending to fix back in Groups' early days) was its inefficient sorting system. Groups has a quirk/bug that Deja managed to avoid: simply put, threads with like-titles are "merged together" in the "view thread" interface, despite not necessarily having anything to do with each other. Say you're searching for information, and it comes up in a thread called "The Beatles on tape." You click on the "View thread" button. In the left pane will be a huge list of responses. But most will likely not be related to the discussion at hand, as Google throws all threads ever titled "The Beatles on tape" into that list. Deja would intelligently organize by article ID, generally preventing that sort of thing from happening, but Google never bothered to fix that design quirk despite promises to the contrary.
From the look of the new Groups, it appears as if Google's trying to create an odd synthesis between Yahoo Groups and Usenet. I certainly hope they don't forget that providing a well-thought-out Usenet interface should be priority #1, with Yahoo-esque bells-and-whistles as a secondary concern.
I got invited a few weeks ago, 24hrs later I got 3 invites, then a week after that another 3. AFAIK people on google owned blog sites got 25 or so. It's part of an effort to 1. get more people on to test gmail, and 2. reduce the chance of people sellign them on ebay for large amounts of money.
You do know that "Google Groups" is actually just a front end for USENET, and that USENET predates Google.com by about 15 years?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Actually, Google Groups 2 was already in beta for awhile a few months ago, but then they took it down.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
you mean like this or like this?
or perhaps a translation tool?
try these too.
This is to compete with yahoo groups, and the old egroups when it existed. It's not meant to have anything to do with usenet. It lets you host an email listserv-type-thing but with a web presence too, without having to have your own server.
May 13.
Anyways, I have tested a few google groups, its an odd combination of usenet and yahoo groups. Not planning on doing much with them unless google adds more features.
I've been using the new Groups 2 for months. Where has /. been? Mars, perhaps?
And you might want to check out this one.
If anyone from Google is reading this, check this out: If the posting uses ISO-2022-JP character set, the Japanese characters show up as some kind of question marks (at least in Firefox 0.8), when viewing the posting in the default, "parsed", mode. For example: parsed article.
BUT, if the viewing mode is set to "show original", the same posting comes up with correct characters (but with ultra-tiny font?!): original version
It has the codes to create a new ng, but it doesn't seem all too clear on where you need to send them. Presumably, this is on purpose...
There's some more information here and all the information should be in RFC 1036, especially part 3.3 of the document.
My fear is that Google is going to end up just like Altavista did!
Since three months the Dutch traditional sailing ship rental market has experienced very sophisticated "Google spam" from some large booking offices. This has lead to a serious decline in business of the so called "free ships" that do not work with those booking offices. Reporting this spam to Google has had no result at all... Could this non-response lead to the end of Google? Remember that Altavista was the number one search engine until the flood of "spam" rendered their search results useless. What can be done to stop Google spam if Google does not seem to react to a large number of submitted spam reports?
First some background information. My girlfriend's uncle has been a captain of a traditional sailing ship in the Netherlands for many years now. You can rent his crewed ship for a day, weekend, midweek or week. He is a so called "free captain" since he is not working for one of the booking offices, that in his opinion charge too much.
One of the ways he reaches potential customers is a website which looks quite professional and until this year received a reasonable number of visitors mostly via Google. The problem is that this number has dropped dramatically since some booking offices found a way to get high positions in Google in an "illegal" way: Not with real content but with fake pages that are there to fool Googlebot.
Some of the biggest players in the Dutch charter market (Zeilvaart.com and Zeilvloot.nl) probably hired an expert to enable them to get those high positions. I will try to explain what I found out about the method they are using.
Zeilvaart.com
If you search Google for: site:zeilvaart.com html you will find about 1300 html pages that are all fake pages since it is an ASP website without real html pages. The standard layout of the fake pages is:
Left column: menu with links to other fake pages
Middle column: some text about a random ship
Right column:
- "Verzekerd zeilen..." -> some text about insurance with a link
- "Zeilervaring niet nodig..." -> some text about sailing experience with a link
- "Over de Zeilvaart..." -> some text about the company Zeilvaart
Top menu: leads to the real website
All the fake pages have file names that contain words people might search for when planning a sailing trip. The pages are all the same except for the different links to other fake pages and random ship information.
Take for example this page that is aimed at the key phrase "zeilen IJsselmeer" ("sailing IJsselmeer" in Dutch):
http://zeilen.zeilvaart.com/zeilen_ijsselmeer.html (Google cache)
All the key words are in the URL and on the page are many links to other fake pages that contain other key words, both in content and in URL name: Personeelsuitje, Vergaderarrangement IJsselmeer, SAIL Amsterdam, Zeilen Batavia, Zeilen Teambuilding, etc.
When someone searches Google for these exact words Zeilvaart.com always shows up as one of the first results..... This is big time Google spam! What makes it even worse is that they have started to use Google as their bill board because the title of the page is:
"Heb jij ook zin om te zeilen in het IJsselmeer? Kijk dan op de site van De Zeilvaart!" which translates to:
"Do you also feel like sailing the IJsselmeer? Have a look at the De Zeilvaart site!"
They have given all fake pages such commercial-like titles....
Only clicking an option from the top menu will lead to their real website.
The equivalent in German "segeln IJsselmeer" leads to:
Helevius
It suggests posting the message to the new group itself, or alternatively alt.config.
Which version of firefox? I believe there is a bug that has been fixed in the later nightly builds which causes firefox to freeze when going to that site. It has somthing to do with the security certificate, IIRC.