Solo Technology

The folks at Google are just churning stuff out lately, aren’t they? Today’s big announcement was about the new face at Google Groups. And based on what I’ve seen so far, I like it. Hope something like this becomes the default at groups.google.com soon (if you haven’t read the linked article, check at groups-beta.google.com).

Not all that long ago I was trying to find a usenet reader for my PC. I settled on Mozilla Thunderbird at the time. To be honest, that didn’t last too terribly long. One, I just never got all that “comfortable” with it and two, more importantly, even for usenet it turns out I like web based solutions. And that was Google Groups. Warts and all, it just works. And works from whatever computer I’m using.

The new interface is nice. Similar in look and feel to what we just got with Google Reader and what we’ve had with Google Mail. Easier on the eyes, in my opinion. The ability to define a logo and customize a start page aren’t all that exciting to me at the moment, but the overall refresh of the UI is nice. Haven’t played with this new-fangled Pages thing yet, but it looks interesting too. Being able to share files with other group members? Yeah, that could be useful.

Overall, I see this as a positive step forward. There’s still a wealth of information in the land of usenet and this will help find it and contribute to it in an easy fashion.

I realize some readers may be wondering just what the heck usenet is… So, for them:

Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post email-like messages (called “articles”) to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is distributed among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Individual users download and post messages to a single server, usually operated by their internet service provider or university, and the servers exchange the messages between each other.

[wikipedia]

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