Last week, I posted my opinion about Yahoo! Groups and how it still was a leader in the space in terms of group communication platforms. Well, soon after publishing the post, I got an email from one of my google Engineering friends who suggested I take another look at the new google Groups, now offered in beta. I have been on a number of google Groups already, and knew the chief architect of the original build. This version has a lot of changes that definitely improve the service in such a way that it makes it a much more servicable application from the web, unlike Yahoo!'s reskinning of the eGroups interface. And, if you like gmail, my earlier post on google Calendar and understand the power of a wiki, then you will definitely enjoy using google Groups.

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Over eight years ago, a guy named Scott Hassan was looking at a mailing list software package called Majordomo which had all the complexity of a particle accelerator. He was looking to build a mailing list for python programmers (a programming language, not the snakes) and decided to modify another package for his own. From this tinkering was borne eGroups which, two years later, was purchased for $450M and became what we now know as Yahoo! Groups.

You might ask, after so many years, hasn't anyone come up with a better group communications package that surpasses eGroups (I still use the eGroups name, since I was Director of Marketing back in 1999)? goggle Groups was relaunched a little over a year ago, and there are a number of free mailing list and community tool companies out in the market.

But in the years since, Yahoo! has kept the balance of functionality and service in play for eGroups that it is often sited as the better tool for group management out of them all. And, while I may be biased due to my allegence, you would be hard pressed to find a better community management tool for the price. In coming posts, I will discuss strengths and weaknesses between the different tools (a special post on google Groups, definitely), to ensure we do learn about more solutions that can offer tools that meet different organizations needs.

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