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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.
While the idea of a GMailish like system for newsgroups is a good thing, the whole thing seems limited by the fact that new groups can only be viewed using Google Groups, which gives them less readership.
How many Google Accounts does one need? Google presently maintains unrelated signons for...
- Google AdWords (to buy ads with Google)
- Google AdSense (for webmasters who want to show Google's ads)
- Google Answers (their rather obscure paid researcher solution)
- Free SiteSearch (for webmasters who want a custom colorset when users use a Google box on their site)
- Google API (for programmers who want to use Google via SOAP)
- GMail (the hot webmail beta test)
- Google Groups Beta (the new service we're talking about)
- Blogger (the blog site they aquired)
Yahoo and MSN/Passort of course have the privacy implications of there being a single-signon accross a wide network of websites some of which are operated by partner companies... but Google is developing the reverse problem. As you move from one service of Google to another, and the user may very well have different passwords at each of the logon points. Very confusing, and an annoyance to users.
The good news is that Google appears to be in the process of merging these databases for the free services and an account created today for one free services now gets access to all of them except GMail. They are showing signs that they intend on getting AdWords and AdSense into that system as well. Hopefully we'll just need one google.com cookie to get everything Google has soon...
As Google keeps expanding, they are looking more and more like a simplified Yahoo!.
Will Google put people off by losing the one thing that made them extremely individual in the big wide world of web search engines/portals?
Beta test it?
"Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds."
Well, I did my part!
... very old.
http://labs.google.com, check it out. The Google groups Bata have been oublic for a while now.
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.
GSpot: surf and organize all your porn in convenient directories. Sort by threads, or lack thereof!
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
I can make a *real* newsgroup. Ph33R M3!
(It's not rocket science. You just have to know the right codes to put in a newsgroup post.)
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Unfortunetly, you can't post on usent using google, unless you're willing to post your shiny new gmail address for all the world's spammers to see :(
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
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.
That's the part that worries me. I typed my first Usenet post over ten years ago, shortly after getting my first internet account (yeah, I know, I was on AOL, but we were all young and stupid once.) What struck me about Usenet was the properties that I soon learned applied to the Internet as a whole: Nobody owns Usenet or its content, nobody can easily regulate or censor Usenet, and Usenet tends to find its way around any distruptions in service (since it's not all stored on one giant server.) One day DajaNews started collecting and saving Usenet posts, making them available through their web site. I found that idea disturbing, sort of like when I saw my first Canter & Segal spam. I quickly realized, however, that given enough disk space and bandwidth I too could archive all the chatter and discourse that is Usenet, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop me. Usenet discussions could theoretically be made immune to virtual book burning.
DejaNews was eventually bought by Google, which continues to archive most of the non-binary groups, as well as provide a web-based portal to Usenet. It does not, however, have the only copy of Usenet. Other companies like Yahoo, Delphi, ( and even Slashdot) have created their own user group systems, accessable only from their servers, and viewable only with a web browser (after all, what good is the Internet if you can't put banner ads on it?) If you don't like the way that your newsreader sorts & displays, you can get a different one, or even write your own. If you don't like the spam posts that Delphi weaves among regular ones, or the spam page that they present to you before allowing you to see a group, tough sh*t. You'll read Delphi postings the way they want you to , or you won't read them at all. If Delphi goes belly up, all their archived posts could go to the highest bidder, or maybe just disappear completely.
Google has always worn the white hats, so far. If they become as popular with these groups that "aren't actual Usenet groups." as they've gotten with their search engine, what happens if Usenet slowly dissappears when everyone jumps on the Googler bandwagon? What happens if this central database, owned by a single company, is no longer freely accessable?
BTW, I highly recommend GigaNews Usenet service. I've used them for about 5 years now; good consistant service, & they never tried to pull anything sneaky.
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I just sent this to groups-support@google.com:
I just tried to subscribe to some groups, read some threads and have google groups keep track of it. I'd say it is 10 times as slow as using a good usenet client. IMO the main advantage of usenet over webforumes etc. is the availability of efficient clients, filters, scoring systems, kill-files etc. that allow you to scan through a large number of groups/threads in minimal time. No web interface will ever come close to that.
One thing I've always admired is Google Groups' user interface -- the pane along the left-hand side makes it very clear where you are at in navigating a thread.
/. is better the way it is?)
Contrast this to Slashdot, where navigating the comments threads can be very confusing. I wish Slashdot could be re-written to something similar to GG. Anyone know the correct address for submitting this kind of suggestion?
(Or, on the other hand, any good reason
- Alaska Jack
It is now going to be a competitor. Read that again until you get it - this is a BIG, BIG change.
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:
Show me one free, instant, on-line translation tool that DOES produce sensical translations.
Where's the fun in that?
For instance, let's take a quote. I found this one in someone's signature a while ago.
"The main reason for the downfall of the Roman Empire was, that lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful completion of a C program"
Translate it to English to German:
"der Hauptgrund für den Downfall des römischen Reiches war, dieses mangelnde null, sie hatte keine Weise, erfolgreiche Beendigung eines c-Programms anzuzeigen"
I don't know German, so let's go back to English:
"The Main reason for the case of down OF the novel Empire which, that lacking zero, they had NO way ton indicate successful completion OF A C program"
It's already getting a little garbled, but let's not stop yet. From garbled English to French:
"la raison principale du cas de vers le bas de l'empire de roman que, ce zéro manquer, elles n'a fait indiquer AUCUNE tonne de manière l'accomplissement réussi du programme C de A"
I do know French, and that doesn't look quite right. Let's go back to English again:
"principal reason of the case of to the bottom of the empire of novel that, this zero to miss, they did not make indicate ANY ton in manner the achievement successful of the program C of A"
You could, of course, send the result to Portugeese and back, ending up with:
"main reason of the example to the deep one of the empire of the novel that, this zero to lack, had not made to indicate ANY ton in the way the successful accomplishment it program C of"
Or through Italian, which leaves us with:
"main reason of the example to that deep one of the empire of the novel of that, this zero to difettare of, had not made in order to indicate WHICHEVER ton in the sense the succeeded realization it program C"
Now where would we be if we didn't have Google's Translation sevice to make fun of?