Google Labs Offering Google Groups 2

Google Labs has launched Google Groups 2. When you think Google Groups, you think Usenet, but Google Groups 2 is also offering the ability to create, join, and search mailing lists (which is an interesting flank attack on Yahoo.) The site is available directly at http://groups-beta.google.com/ .

The new Google Groups allows a friendly way to browse newsgroups (subject index), but what really fascinates me are the ability to create e-mail groups. To noodle with that you'll need a Google Groups account. If you don't have one no biggie; they're free and require only an e-mail address and password. You'll also have to confirm your address before you can use your account.

Once you've confirmed your e-mail address, you're free to create a group. You can specify the group name, e-mail address, 300-letter description, and access level (public, announcement-only, and restricted.) There's also a checkbox to specify when a mailing list is not appropriate for minors.

I was able to figure out that the Google search (plain Google) of inurl:groups-beta site:groups-beta.google.com will point you toward a few new groups. There is a group dedicated to Google Groups 2, of course, and that's a good one to explore at http://groups-beta.google.com/group/google-labs-groups2/ . Listings show how many members belong to a group as well as active topics and a link to start a new topic (if it's allowed in the group.) If you'd rather browse this or any other Google Groups 2 group via syndicated format, you have that option; Google Groups 2 generates RSS feeds (Atom format). Just append the group directory with /feeds/ . For example, if you wanted to get the Atom feed for Google's public support group, try http://groups-beta.google.com/group/google.public.support.general/feeds/ .

Note that while I was able to get this to work for the most part, I got some server errors and timeouts. I suspect the site's busy. A couple of reloads usually cleared up the problem.

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