Could Google be killing Google Groups over and over again?

The death of Usenet has been proclaimed for well over a decade now, but the use of some derivative of the Internet's NNTP protocol for the trafficking of messages -- some of which are actually parts of legitimate conversations -- continues today. In fact, it probably can't really be stopped since, as is the case with a P2P network, no one really owns Usenet.

Since 2001, the Web's portal to Usenet has been Google Groups, the successor to the Deja.com archiving system. Google's plans to make something of Google Groups stretch as far back as 2004, with promises to make the experience more personalized and exciting. For the most part, Google Groups provides organizations with an expense-free system for broadcasting memberships to select groups on an opt-in basis.

Whether one considers Google Groups dead depends on where one stands, especially whether it's up- or downwind. In another indication that the ties of friendship binding Google with Mozilla are fraying in the wake of Google's efforts to upstage Mozilla in the browser market, Mozilla engineer John Resig -- the co-creator of the jQuery library that is revolutionizing JavaScript -- pronounced Google Groups dead from his vantage point, in a blog post that could carry some real weight.

As Resig wrote last Tuesday, "The primary problem with Google Groups boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces."

Spam is systemic on Usenet newsgroup systems, appearing at times to be a self-sustaining entity independent of any human influence whatsoever. It's adopted a language that is almost speakable, but that doesn't conform completely to any one country's or people's real grammar, and that's usually laced with sexual or otherwise gratuitous innuendo intentionally misspelled so as to foil the most basic filters.

Resig, who has co-moderated the jQuery Google Group, described a situation where Usenet spam has evolved to such a point that it bypasses Google's (optional) moderation system, eventually generating messages that appear to be from group members themselves. (Surprisingly, that's not unlike the experience our Carmi Levy has been having with Facebook.) As it stands now, the moderation process Resig describes -- part of that 2004 features improvement test that's still ongoing -- makes it the moderator's duty to shuffle individual spam elements, often numbering in the thousands, to a deletion column. There, because of outdated layout, a moderator can actually find himself deleting a member from the service along with the spam, in an incident Resig actually describes.

"Nothing quite like insulting, confusing, and scaring your users, due to a poorly-designed user interface and abysmal spam detection," he wrote. "This is the reality that Google Group owners have to live with on a daily basis."
Mozilla is in a position to host its own moderated forum, and will be doing so shortly. Building one's own forum software is nothing like re-inventing the wheel. The problem is, once the wheel's already invented, fewer folks are interested in the idea of building one -- a bit like sending men to the moon once they've already been there. Although free moderated forum hosting alternatives do exist, such as the well-reviewed Invision Plus, there appears to be little incentive these days for a major player like Google to invest too much of its resources in traffic between free agents and other free agents.

The most recent indication from Google itself that Google Groups such as Resig has come to know it truly is dying -- or at least morphing -- came last August, when an associate product manager for the project referred to it not as a platform for Usenet conversation, but rather as a free method for gathering multiple mail addresses together as recipients for Google Docs Web apps...a sort of poor person's Active Directory.

"We recently rolled out improvements to the way Google Groups interacts with several of our applications," wrote Google's Jeffrey Chang, referring to it as an impersonal platform rather than a personal meeting place. "Now, sharing calendars, sites and documents with multiple people is easy -- instead of adding people one at a time, you can simply share with an entire Google Group."

Those who have mourned the "death" of Google Groups as an interactive forum, and who continue to mourn the "death" of Usenet, may find it is within their power to continue their conversations and friendships elsewhere. You don't just stop being friends with someone because the restaurant where you met burned down, and though one may mourn the loss of the restaurant, it's not being able to associate a living memory with a living place that people tend to miss most. As a friend suggested to me once, when the monkeys take over the asylum, why not move to another asylum already?