The Death of Usenet
Ok, it is probably a little early to make this proclamation based on the growth of the usenet community around Microsoft.public groups, but the news of AOL no longer offering Usenet Access is a sign of things to come. The best post I've seen about this comes from Many 2 Many.
"This feels to me like they’re tearing down an old diner in a neighborhood I used to live in. I never go there anymore, but I spent 5 years of my life on usenet, and 2 of those years in a fever I can’t characterize as anything other than addiction. I learned to write there, and it’s one of only two places where I had people I’d call real friends who I never met IRL. (The other was Old Man Murray, RIP.)..."
"Still, it feels kind of funny. Usenet was such a spectacular experiment in the annals of human communication, the idea that it’s value isn’t worth the cost of keeping the servers running comes as a marker of things I already knew, but which still feel different when they become facts in the world. "
Personally I heard some of the Microsoft.public newsgroups most staunch supporters (our MVPs) really start foretelling the death of Usenet at the MVP summit this past year. The allure of modern web-forum based communities with moderation, improved identity, less spam, etc is starting to tear some of them away. Last year many of the developer newsgroups (and I'll lump developers into an early adopter category) actually saw a decrease in the number of return users. Look at the Asp.Net forum community. It already outpaces all of the public Asp.Net newsgroups. Sure, these are web guys, so they would naturally gravitate to the web interface. But how long is it before someone makes a great offline client that talks to standard web protocols to fit the bill of other high volume contributors whose only reason for not moving to web forums is the desire for the faster client cached access?
Comments
- Anonymous
January 26, 2005
A better news group / forums protocol perhaps? One that will support the ease of use of client progrmas and also the ease of use of the web interface. Like RSS perhaps? XML based? But a protocol that will allow identification, reading and posting of posts (feeds) and other fields like for avators. In other words a protocol that will give client programs access to web forums. Is it so difficult to create? Based on RSS perhaps? Why doesn't Microsoft try? - Anonymous
January 26, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 26, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 26, 2005
"long is it before someone makes a great offline client that talks to standard web protocols ..."
The web protocols would have to come first. I would hate to see someone writing a client that just uses screen-scraping to deliver the forum content on asp.net.
So, is there any such initiave underway? I doubt it. Asp.net and every other web forum, for that matter, wants people to use their webpage to view the advertisements. But maybe a fee-based rich client access could work. Not sure if I would pay for that or not. It wouldn't be worth much. It's not that different from RSS except that RSS is only one direction and we would need read-write(post) access. - Anonymous
January 26, 2005
Ross Mayfield has been chatting with Marc Smith about Netscan His blog entry (and the associated Flickr series) shows some cool pictures of the reply-to network in Usenet: that is, the network of who replies to messages by someone else.... - Anonymous
January 31, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
February 04, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 16, 2009
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