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Google Groups is a free groups and mailing list service from Google. Using Google Groups, one can find groups related to their interests and participate in threaded conversations. Besides posting to the group through the Google Groups web interface, users also can post to a group by sending an e-mail to the group's e-mail address. They can also create their own groups and access Usenet newsgroups dating back to 1981.
History In February 2001, Google acquired Deja.com, which provided a search engine to access an archive of Usenet newsgroup articles. Users were then able to access these Usenet newsgroups through the new Google Groups interface. By the end of 2001 the archive was completed with messages dating back to 11 May 1981. Shortly after, Google released a new version, which allowed users to create their own (non-Usenet) groups. In February 2006, Google added several features to Google Groups. These features include an enhanced interface, profiles and rating posts. Groups search
Directory Google Groups has a directory of most Google groups and Usenet groups. Some group owners have set their groups to not appear in the directory. The directory organizes groups by topic, region, language, activity level and number of members. Profiles Users may create public profiles which display their name, nickname, location, title, industry, website, blog and quote, as well as the most recent posts they made. Their profiles are accessible to anyone by clicking on "View Profile" beside any of their posts. Joining/subscribing to a group Subscribing to a group offers the following benefits: There are four subscription options, Email, Digest Email, Abridged Email and No Email: Reading a group archive/list of threads
Posting and reading in a thread
Rating posts A user can rate a post with 1 to 5 out of 5 stars. A post's rating is based on the average of all the user ratings it gets, and a thread's rating is based on the average rating of all the posts in the thread, and is displayed next to the thread author (in View with message text mode) or thread name (in Viewing titles only mode). Starring threads In the thread list, there is a star next to every thread. Once clicked on, the star turns yellow and the thread is "starred", and it appears in the user's "My starred topics" list. E-mail masking To prevent scammers or spammers from harvesting e-mail addresses from a group, Google replaces the last three letters of a username in an e-mail address with periods. To view the full e-mail address, one has to click on the periods and enter a verification code to prove they are human, after which a page will load with the full e-mail addresses displayed. However, when posting to a Usenet newsgroups, your email address will be visible to anybody using a Usenet newsreader to read your post. See *. Google Groups does not allow use of an invalid or obfuscated e-mail address (like user-at-domain.com), which you could use to prevent e-mail harvesters from retrieving your address from Usenet newgroups. Creating groups Google Groups allows users to easily create their own groups. During the creation process, the user is prompted for a group name, e-mail address, description, and access setting, and then adds or invites members to the new group. Managing groups A moderator (owner or manager) can edit the group's name, description and e-mail address, get a promotion box, add or remove categories to the group, modify the access settings (access of memberships, invites, archives and directory listing), modify posting and delivery settings (posting privileges and moderation, availability of replies and subject prefixes), modify related groups, and browse the membership list (invite, add, ban or unsubscribe members, and make them a manager or owner, and change their delivery type). Adding or inviting members Members of a group with the privileges to do so can invite or add new members to the group. In the process, they will be asked to set a subscription type for the new member, and enter a welcome message. The new member will receive a notification e-mail. People who do not have a Google Account may be invited or added, but they need to create a Google Account to accept the invite and post to the group. Creating and updating group web pages In the beta version of October 5, 2006, Google announced a new web 2.0 interface and the Pages feature that is now available for all new groups. There is an AJAX wysiwyg editor to create group pages that can be edited by group members or group managers. Pages can link to each other and Google keeps versions of pages, so this feature is a sort of Wiki within the group. Comments added at bottom of pages appear also in the Discussion section of the group. Official Google Groups Google has created several official help groups for some of its services, such as Gmail. In these groups, users can ask and answer questions about the relevant Google service. Each official group has a Google representative who occasionally responds to queries. Google representatives always have a green G symbol in their nicknames. Official groups are divided into three or more subgroups. Non-official groups created by users may not be divided into subgroups, although this feature is commonly requested by users. * The main group shows a "viewing titles only" interface for the first few threads of each of the subgroups. In official groups, there are only two subscrption options: "Abridged Email" and "No Email", and it is not possible for two members to have the same nickname. There is a filter which replaces any e-mail addresses posted in a message with email address; however, it is easy to bypass the filter by adding spaces in between. The e-mail addresses of members who post in an official group are not visible to others through the "show options" or "view profile" links. Members who post to official groups have a separate profile where their e-mail address is hidden and only official groups are listed. * Some official groups include: Google also uses Google Groups to host their Google Friends and Google Page Creator Updates mailing lists, which are announcement-only groups where only moderators can post. URL and e-mail address of a group When creating a group, the owner must specify a group name which will be part of the group's URL and e-mail address. The "username" can be changed later (see Managing Groups). The URL of a Google group is http://groups.google.com/group/ followed by the group's name. The e-mail address of a Google group is the group's name followed by @googlegroups.com. For example, if the group's name is MinorsMajor, the group's URL will be http://groups.google.com/group/MinorsMajor and the e-mail address will be MinorsMajor@googlegroups.com. Google Groups vs. Usenet Google Groups provides access to Usenet newsgroups as well. When AOL discontinued access to Usenet, it recommended Google Groups instead. Google Groups honors the "X-No-Archive: Yes" header field, and removes messages with it (in the message header or as first line of the message body) from its archive after 7 days. The URL for accessing Usenet newsgroups through Google Groups is http://groups.google.com/group/ followed by the group's hierarchy. For example, the Usenet group alt.games.neopets's URL is http://groups.google.com/group/alt.games.neopets. With some tricks, Google Groups can search related newsgroups for a given topic, an example is the shorthand (redirect) for searches in net-abuse groups: Criticism On 16 October 2003, John Wiley & Sons sent a letter to Google after discovering that copyrighted text from a book they published was made available for download on a Google group. * See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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