Google Groups has just unveiled a beta of their product. The Google Groups application can be used to read and reply to traditional Usenet newsgroups, or to participate in user created groups. User created groups can be found on many subjects, and you can create pretty much any group you are interested in. The user created groups are similar to the groups available from Yahoo.
Details of the new features are available on the Google Blog. I want to highlight a couple of things I found to be cool:
- There is a new Files section in each group. Something that was missing, and is especially useful in game related groups that rely on rules, errata, and FAQ files.
- The group management options are much nicer now as well. I like the ability to change the order of navigation in the group sidebar, and the ability to manage an external mailing list via Google Groups. I am not sure if this was available before, but it is a nice idea. Each group gets a custom e-mail address. Subscribe that address to the mailing list, and Google will add the messages from the mailing list to the group. Not sure how well (or even if) it handles threaded discussions, but cool nevertheless.
- They have also added a pages feature, based generally on the Google Pages features, that allows members to add custom made HTML pages to any group. Quite nice.
It looks like a lot of things have changed, perhaps I will look to Google Groups more for creating fast community and/or topic related sites.