TechNayak(mirror)

Google groups just announced that its out of beta and completely revamped. The experimental groups concept was started almost two years back and has finally come of age. It packs with it some amazing new features and usability tricks.

The immediate distinction is the slick new UI that is introduced, which has customisable colors and image. Discussions also has taken a prominent role with a new GMail like interface. Like getting all rss feeds for a comment, you can choose to get updates to a discussion by mail, a concept introduced in mailing lists like Mailman. You can even reply back by mail.

There is a new feature called pages that are incorporated, like the pages on blogs. Whats interesting is the angle that is given on those pages, claiming to help building knowledge bases . Great take I feel , will definetely turn some corporate heads. There is also a file sharing for small files. I don’t follow this, from the looks of it, Google has clearly tried to make a wiki out of groups, this is suprising because it comes after the acquisition of Jotspot which is targeted towards such a cause. Is this again inter company strategy lag or just something that will turn out for the good in course of time , is yet to be seen. Like Yahoo , Google also has competeing products in house, JotSpot against Groups ( Giki) .

Here are some screenshots.