Google has launched the new
Google Groups beta, a version of their bulletin board service that's been souped up to meet 21st century standards.
All of the conversations have been mashed into an expanding and collapsing Ajaxy "cards" style interface, much like the way
GMail conversations work. You can read threads much more easily this way.
At first, I thought it was a little strange to build out a simple bulletin board into a color-coded stack of threads. As an old school BBS poster (talkin' about the 1980s, y'all), I prefer my message boards and discussion groups to work and read like an old, crufty email client. It's been that way for so long, that's just what I expect. But now, email clients are changing. They're browser based or they're full-color and slick. Or, in many cases, both. I've been a GMail user for a year now, and the thread feature is a life-saver.
So after clicking around in the alt.music section for a while, these enhancements make perfect sense. There are some other new Groups features, too. Group owners can customize colors, fonts and welcome messages. Groups members can kibbutz in a new Members area or engage in centralized, non-illicit file sharing in the Files area. The Groups beta also has a Pages feature that lets members collaborate on web pages for their group.
On top of all that, you get built-in functionality with other Google services like GMail and chat. Read all about the new Google Groups beta at the
official Google Blog.