YahooGroups

==Insights==
===Steven Cliff posted in 2010===
Back in the day, eGroups (which became YahooGroups through
acquisition) revolutionized group formation online in 1998.
Prior to that time you had to essentially have your own server or be
based at an university to run an e-mail list. It took me many months
to find the folks at the U of Minn in 1993 where I could host the
Public Policy Network e-mail list that got me into online group
building originally. With E-Democracy.org (until we moved to
YahooGroups for a number of years) we were lucky to have Minnesota's
then largest ISP and regional Internet node host our MN-Politics forum
using "majordomo." Remember that name?
While newsgroups were available, at least with politics, they were
anonymous bottom of barrel conspiracy theory filled spaces like online
news commenting is today. E-mail lists typically brought real
identities to the fore because most people simply do not have the time
to manage an alias via a webmail account. (The web forums, blog
commenting systems, and MySpace went the newsgroup "alias" route and
Facebook basically went old school by adopting real identities like
most e-mail list users.)
The problem with e-mail list tools, is that developers haven't found
them sexy to work with. Mailservers are a pain and keeping spammers at
bay a challenge. So while Google Groups and YahooGroups remain popular
services, they've really languished. (One reason why we went with open
source http://GroupServer.org so we could still allow lowest common
denominator e-mail publishing while getting the web interface into a
semi-competitive position to compete with the expectations of new more
web-centric, now social networking centric users.)
YahooGroups is trying to change that and make e-mail lists look modern
on the web:
http://www.ygroupsblog.com/blog/?p=722
They are trying to make the functioning of e-mail lists look more Ning
or social networking like.
So, I find some of the comments quite interesting (I need to see an
actual new group in action to judge what features are gone). When
folks ask E-Democracy.org why we don't "just use" Ning or Drupal
or Facebook etc. in part it is because in general - most of your
existing user base - will not come with you if you change to much (or
in particular if you try to force them to move) and in our case
sacrifice e-mail publishing to essentially look better to potential
new users. Now it could well be that we could serve many more
communities (perhaps at a lower quality threshold) by creating
Facebook Pages with trained facilitators for our Issues Forums, but
like the YahooGroups group owners are experiencing you no longer
control your own destiny when the real owner changes things based on
their goals/mission and not your own.
Category:internet