How to revamp Yahoo! Groups? (by Jeremy Zawodny)

How to revamp Yahoo! Groups? (by Jeremy Zawodny):

There are bits of JotSpot (notable Tracker), WordPress, and Flickr that I think could be sprinkled into Yahoo Groups, not to mention Google Maps and/or Wayfaring, Yahoo! Local, Google Calendar, and a few other things.

This definitely means thinking about Yahoo Groups as more than place to host a free mailing list, which is how most people use it today.

But before I ramble on too long, I’d like to know how you would like to see Yahoo! Groups evolve. What’s missing? What killer applications or add-on services deserve to be part of the service? Are there alternative services that are providing a lot of this already?

Updating Yahoogroups is definitely due.

The mailing list, as we generally consider it today, is a dead technology; as dead as USENET; as dead as gopher.

Which doesn’t mean interacting via email is dead — just the mailing list. In reality, email is going strong, and will continue. But it’s time to take a strong step forward, and stop looking at transmission protocols as how you define a service. To start, if I were doing this, I’d look at (a) strong integration with all other yahoo services, and (b) think of it as a data store that users can access in any number of ways (email, rss, web, sms, pigeon); with a strong user configuration/filtering capability to let the user define that interaction to their tastes.

yahoo’s actually got a leg up on most places, since groups already integrates pretty well with the web, and so adding good syndication (per-user, not generic), and real customization and filtering for users, would be relatively easy.

But the first step is to stop thinking in terms of “mailing lists”, and start thinking in terms of “community that uses email — some of the time”. One community, many protocols. stop stovepiping by socket port number….

boy, that’d be a fun hack….

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