Privacy issues aside, the real story behind Deja News is the search engine itself and the ease with which information is now available on Usenet. When I first started the company I knew the potential of the discussion groups, and knew the tens of millions of people participating needed a way to search. The only question in my mind was whether we could singularly dominate the space. If we were able, I knew we'd have to grow at this rate. But now, we expect the Internet discussion group market to grow rather rapidly over the next few years again.
Discussion groups are the one thing that the Internet is the only medium that can do it.
There's no other communication medium in which you can go out and send a message to thousands of people and any of them can respond to it, also to thousands of people. Austin Chronicle . Info Booth .