Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles: Usenet
wired.com
wired.com
In the end, then, the rusting shell of Google Groups is
a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not
a modern-day Library of Alexandria.I must confess to being a brainwashed Googlevangelist, but anyway... if it wasn't for Google's (lucrative) actions, maybe non-profit projects such as the Internet Archive might not have saved those magtapes in time.
Shame, really.
* I don't have anyone specific in mind, here; politicians, all of 'em.
He also did things like send cancels on people quoting his insulting stuff long afterwards, so they wouldn't show up with his name in Google.
I had read the rfc:s, but couldn't even imagine anyone would be so unserious at the time. Ah, innocence.
I don't know if Google still remove messages when cancels show up on Usenet, but you could try...
Edit: OK, I can't complain about the downvotes; it was a joke but it is arguably immoral to remove information.
(For a group so enthusiastic about version control with a leader who pushed for etherpad's timeline document history, this one vote then lockin feels a bit out of character)
It's not that people aren't interested in chatting to each other on the internet, I waste depressingly large quantities of time reading and posting in 5-6 different forums, this being one of them. There's still one usenet group I read regularly, but it's degraded to 50% spam and embittered ranting from an unhappy kibo clone.
I haven't seen any web message board UI that truly brings something new to the threaded-discussion style that pretty much all the old Usenet clients used.
Which is a shame, really, because I'd much prefer to read blogs via an NNTP reader (I suspect, anyway).
If you use Thunderbird RSS reader to read blogs, you pretty much get the Same look and feel. I was used to Thunderbird NNTP client, when I started adding blog subscriptions to Thunderbird, the transition was seamless
The problem is that individual communities almost always want to control the look & feel of their forums. So as they start growing, they eventually outgrow the hosted, consistent UI and get something like vBulletin that they can customize themselves. The biggest ones end up ditching third-party forums entirely and writing custom software that's integrated with the rest of their site.
Forums are not a natural monopoly - there's no economic reason for one company to "own" them. We have the option of creating a Google Group that's basically alt.hacking.ycombinator with a prettier name. Several hacking groups do just that. But this community is big enough that it has special needs, so news.YC arises naturally anyway.
alt.games.programming used to be one such place.
They used to be read-only; now, they allow anyone with a fake account to post. They are a huge source of Usenet spam. I have been kill-filing posts from Google Groups for about a year. It's not a pleasant thing to do, since there still are quite a few people who I like to read but only see quoted in replies now because they use Google Groups.
Whenever someone posts the same article 10 times in a row on a Usenet newsgroup, I always look at the mail header, and every single time it is from Google Groups. I don't know what is wrong, but there must be some user interface bug that causes people to resubmit their post. Maybe they don't realize that Usenet has a lag between posting and seeing your post. Maybe there's something wrong with the submit button. I don't know, but I've been seeing this phenomenon for a few years now.
Initially, Google Groups made a clear distinction between Usenet newsgroups and Google's own groups, but they've been blurring the two more and more over the years. The result is that a lot of people don't even know they're posting to Usenet, and are unaware of the different etiquette and social customs there (real names, top posting, etc.). Lately they've started including third-party forums as well, so now it's basically a free-for-all, and there is no way to just search Usenet anymore. You have a choice between "Google Groups" and "all groups", where the latter includes Google Groups, Usenet, and random bulletin boards on the web.
If Google isn't interested in supporting Usenet with a decent archive anymore (and I can understand their reluctance, since I'm sure there's little to no money in it) I wish they would pass the responsibility to someone else and get out of the way, because at this point I wish Deja News was still around - I'd have no need for Google Groups anymore.
And I know everyone loves to bash on Usenet, about how it's obsolete and dead, but I have to say that at least when it comes to programming language newsgroups, it's still hopping. I follow about a dozen programming newsgroups, and I can't keep up. About once a week I have to "mark all as read". As long as it still causes information overload, I don't think it can be fairly declared extinct.
i.e. I believe that comp.lang.python is the same as the python-list mailing list.
And the advanced search always worked and still works better. http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&sitesearch=g...
(Update: Google has begun fixing the Usenet archive in response to this article)Any pointers to details?
He might similarly warn you about being an 'unfunded revolutionary.'
The Google books settlement gives Google something like a monopoly on "orphaned" titles, titles that would otherwise be entirely unavailable. Whether that's justified or not is debatable.
But unless there's something I don't know, Google Groups is just one archive of usenet and anyone with enough space could create another - in fact, I seem encounter other such archives regularly in my ... Google searches.
It's a bit sad :(
Try to search for old posts by USENET group and with a fixed e-mail address - it will not work properly. What doesn't work:
- search by e-mail address,
- search by USENET group, e.g., comp.lang.perl.misc,
- you must log in to get any reasonable functionality.
Why don't they give it back to the Deja people along with sufficient funding? They were doing it just fine, thank you. Wouldn't worry me if _all_ Google Groups posts were trashed and USENET restored to it's primary role.
USENET was once the most important Internet resource to me and the only one I would have paid for. It's been seriously damaged under Google's reign. Heads really, really should roll over this.
In reference.