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."

Comments

Re:Promising yet limited...

[LostCluster]

On the other hand, Google seems to be in the business of only getting into things they can be #1 at doing.... it's quite possible that Google Groups will become the most read of such discussion sites after this goes live.

Besides, I'm sure all of these Groups will be completely included in Google's index, while Yahoo! Groups and Delphi Forums and other such sites are not because they usually require a signon to see most of the content.

Re:Gmail

[LostCluster]

Not true...

Blogger, AdWords, and AdSense accounts don't work there, yet...

Re:This is great because it's Google

[1u3hr]

Nothing was greater than when Google bought out Delphi and took over the largest USENET archive of all-time. Google always does things the right way without ruining the user experience or their wallets.

Actually, the original dejanews was better (before they got desperate and tried to become a portal). They respected the referrers headers and had largely correct threading. Google lumps all posts together with the same "Subject:" header, even if they're years apart. Also deja wouldn't let you respond to an old message (a month, I think), whereas I often see people who've obviously found a post with a Google search and responded to it, not noticing that it's a few years old.

Also, Google has picked up some groups on servers like Adobe.com and presents them as if they were normal newsgroups. However, they're not, and though Google lets you make a post to them, no one will answwer becasue they only see those posted via Adobe.

I'm not really happy that Google is blending their own groups with Usenet. Too many already can't tell the difference between web forums and Usenet.

address mangling sucks

[Jamie Zawinski]

I just sent this to groups-support@google.com:

Please don't mangle email addresses in Google Groups!

I guess you are doing this because of some misguided belief that it will help with spam, but really all it does is decrease the utility of the internet as a communications medium. I do not hide my email address because I want people to be able to contact me, and the new Google Groups beta destroys the email addresses that I quite intentionally put in my messages. This is bad. Please don't do it.

Here's what the old way looked like: (old way)
And here's the new way: (new way)

What I consider bugs in the new way are:

1. destruction of email addresses in From, Sender, etc headers;

2. destruction of email addresses in the message body;

3. destruction of message IDs in the headers (because sometimes message IDs look like email addresses, you mangle them -- even though it's guarenteed that no email addresses will ever appear in the References or Message-ID headers.)

4. that the returned document is of type text/html instead of type text/plain. It was a good feature of the old system that the "Original Format" link returned a plain text version of the original, tabs and all. Sometimes you want to get at the message as it was actually posted, and not at some marked up approximation thereof.

Other than that, it looks very nice!

Re:Promising yet limited...

[CaptainTux]

I wouldn't rule out the idea that google is trying to become the "new" usenet here, and I actually believe they could pull it off.

As a supporting example, I know at least 30-40 people who have told me "Oh, I read this thing on Google Groups" to which I sometimes replied "Yeah, Usenet can be great" and their response is "What is Usenet? This was on Google!"

Google is doing to Usenet what MS has done to the whole OS concept for a lot of people. Many people don't even realize there *are* other operating systems aside from MS Windows. In this case, many people don't realize there is a seperation between Google and Usenet. They don't understand that all Google does is provide an interface to a *much* older network that has been around since before many of them were even born. *That* my friends is strong branding. Google might not be muddying the waters on purpose but it's still pretty scary isn't it?