Interestingly enough, Yahoo! Groups are still heavily populated and manage to serve as a meeting grounds for millions of people worldwide. The newest update, it seems, brings about some great new features and a really slick UI. Let’s take a look, shall we?
It starts with a new homepage, which combines all of your groups memberships into one easy to access area:
From there, you will find a simplified posting interface, a new conversations panel and then my personal favorite part, the new photo sharing options.
Overall, there are really good chances throughout the Groups pages. So if it’s been a while since you’ve visited the site, it’s worth another look. Full details can be found on the Yahoo! Groups Blog.
Before shamelessly stumping for Yahoo and parroting their PR, just take a quick look at the user feedback. Then the suggestion pages. It’s not a pretty site…pun intended.
No parroting at all. My own opinions, based on what I saw. Everyone has them.
Absolutely Brad – it’s just a shame Yahoo’s opinion is their successful Groups platform needs a ‘me-too’ makeover.
It’s dull when everyone has the same opinion, no?
They could have released the new incarnation as a separate product or option, or at least run a Beta first. Aparrently it’s not the current member’s opinion that counts.
Let’s hope Yahoo relents so that Freecycle and Freegle don’t collapse under the privacy issues raised in disabling “Reply-to-sender”.
…or a company like Zoho or Google steps in to offer their 8 million+ members a free alternative.
I’ve actuall built an alternative interface for Freecycle, Freegle and other similar groups that use Yahoo Groups. It doesn’t suffer any of the problems that the new Yahoo interface brings and it even solves lots of issues with the old Yahoo Groups interface.
You can check it out at http://trashnothing.com It can be used by existing groups without forcing any change in how the groups work.
I agree. The cost of these new features is losing dozens of other features and years of work… all to look like FACEBOOK!
Yahoo! Groups members are not happy, and I am one of them.
The biggest change is that the option to “Reply to Sender” is being removed. For groups like Freegle and Freecycle who have around 9 million list members, this makes the system impossible to use.
Also being removed is the Rich Text editor, and all of the RTF on 12 years of archived messages. For many other groups this renders the stored information totally useless.
There are already over 2000 negative comments on Yahoo’s feedback page, and very very few in support. Since probably the vast majority of Yahoo Groups uysers NEVER look at the group pages, any changes there make little difference.
If Yahoo really want want to make groups look like FB, so what, but the many functions being removed from the mailing lists will kill many groups.