tenpastmidnight blog
Making hay while the sun shines
» Wednesday, May 26, 2004 «
Google Groups 2 beta
While having a poke around in the experimental area of Google today I noticed they have an update to Google Groups: Groups 2 beta. If you have a Gmail account you can log straight in to Groups 2 (I haven't tried with standard Google Groups yet, but I'll bet it will work as well.)
They've updated the interface a bit, matching it more to how Gmail looks. You can 'star' topics, as you can messages with Gmail, then returning to the home page you can see all the active topics you've marked rather than trying to find them again. That's pretty neat.
If you decide to 'Join' a newsgroup, you can have all messages in it e-mailed to you, immediately or as a digest, just as if it was a mailing list. This is very handy for groups which I forget to check and I'm trying it with one of the Volkswagen ones that interests me.
You can add a new Group very easily, by the look of it. This seems to be a competitor to Yahoo Groups. While I like this, I feel it goes against the Usenet side of Google Groups - it's generally tricky to create a new Usenet newsgroup, at least in a section people will look at. However, I can understand why Google want to do more with their groups than just provide a usenet archive / posting system, especially if they're going to compete with all the services Yahoo provides.
As I've now posted in to a newsgroup from my Gmail account, which doesn't let me obscure my e-mail address, I'll soon be able to test out how good the spam filtering is. Old newsgroup posts are the main reason two of my old e-mail addresses still get a ton of spam every month.
They've updated the interface a bit, matching it more to how Gmail looks. You can 'star' topics, as you can messages with Gmail, then returning to the home page you can see all the active topics you've marked rather than trying to find them again. That's pretty neat.
If you decide to 'Join' a newsgroup, you can have all messages in it e-mailed to you, immediately or as a digest, just as if it was a mailing list. This is very handy for groups which I forget to check and I'm trying it with one of the Volkswagen ones that interests me.
You can add a new Group very easily, by the look of it. This seems to be a competitor to Yahoo Groups. While I like this, I feel it goes against the Usenet side of Google Groups - it's generally tricky to create a new Usenet newsgroup, at least in a section people will look at. However, I can understand why Google want to do more with their groups than just provide a usenet archive / posting system, especially if they're going to compete with all the services Yahoo provides.
As I've now posted in to a newsgroup from my Gmail account, which doesn't let me obscure my e-mail address, I'll soon be able to test out how good the spam filtering is. Old newsgroup posts are the main reason two of my old e-mail addresses still get a ton of spam every month.
