About: YahooGroups   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

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?

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  • YahooGroups
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  • 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?
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  • 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 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: 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.
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