An Ode to Google Groups

Normally, companies seem to be in the interest to make money on their products. Even large tech companies which offer apps without any advertising, Whatsapp comes to mind, I would assume are just trying to get more people into their ecosystem.

Google Groups though, seems to be playing a different game. A huge number of public groups are hosted on it, but it is actually difficult to find any of them. There is no browsing functionality, but obviously they have good search integration. I am not sure that any features have been added to it since its release, apart from some visual design changes.

I love it, it is simply an email relaying service with some basic web access. Where all group messaging apps I currently have require you to scroll though every message sent in your group, Google Groups can easily search through Usenet groups with history starting in the 80s. Where every group messenger has a limit to the number of people in a group, Groups’ limits work more like those of a cloud provider’s (Limited by GBs of traffic).

Among Google, and other silicon valley tech companies, Groups is refreshing example of a service which is offered simply as a service to the community. No need to live at the mercy of Facebook’s algorithmic ordering for your FB group, conversations actually show up in the order of your preference. Perhaps you don’t want to use the website? Thats fine, it is an email forwarding service anyway, just use whatever you feel comfortable with to read your email.

I hope that Google keeps running Groups, and I think it will. There is no need to keep it under significant active development, as most of the development is on the side of the email client. The text based, and asynchronus, nature of email as well makes the service (probably) quite easy on their servers. As well, considering the sheer magnitude of their archival data on Usenet groups plus that of their own group format, they have a lot riding on their continued support.