Hi Philippe,
Interesting post :-). I don't have time right now to answer all the pros you mention for newsgroups, so I'll just throw in a couple of things that I think is flawed in your suggestion (rude, perhaps! sorry!).
Philippe A. wrote:
I guess you know what newsgroups are, and that they existed before Google. What Google did is to index them into their database. They did not only that, they also created a great web interface to browse them.
Actually DejaNews did that and then Google bought DejaNews, AFAIR.
) Not everyone has a Gmail account (required to post through Groups) ) Not everyone is adept to using Gmane
Right. But not everyone is adept of (mailing lists|newsgroups|forums|you name it). That's not the question. The question was how we thought things could be improved.
The point was that everyone knows how a browser works.
Newsgroups might be too technical to engage in for newcomers, especially if they're already *very* busy trying to make this new software they've downloaded (Wine) work and everything's failing right and left around their ears with odd 'FontForge' messages, seh_exception overflows and what not.
Costs (worse first in my own opinion):
- Convince existing users to configure their newsreader.
I think the above point is enough to be a showstopper for the newsgroup approach.
Well, you may think that, but really, it's not. They had to configure their mail client for email, and since most (if not all) mail clients still used double as a news reader, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle... Then again, they need to configure their newsreader if they plan on downloading all the warez on USENET (just kidding)
- Segin