Alas, poor Usenet!
Alas poor Usenet I loved thee well! The early history of the Web is intertwined with Usenet. Here's Google's 20 year Usenet timeline beginning in 1981 with the earliest Usenet message archived by Google Groups.
Within Google Groups you will also find messages of historic importance, including Tim Berner-Lee's executive summary of the Web to be in 1991, and Linus Torlvads's words about a "pet project": "This is a program for hackers by a hacker."
In the face of this august creative heritage, where is Usenet today?
The answer, Yorick, is not much of anywhere. In large part, today's Usenet messages are spam, about sex, and some carry malware payloads in their links. In other words, a backwater waste of time -- although not everyone agrees with this characterization, and at least one of my colleagues says that Usenet archives are the best way to find out the real scoop on technical equipment before purchasing it. AOL is cutting Usenet access for its members, and Google Groups seems to be the closest thing to a reasonably accessable current version of Usenet, consisting of the DejaNews portion of the original Usenet archives with technology updates grafted on by Google. Google bought the DejaNews Usenet archives from eBay, which had originally acquired it for Half.com.
It's most nice of the rich folks at Google to carry a torch for Usenet -- probably we all still have some fondness for the days when the Web was a small community of enthusiasts in our heart of hearts. But will Google Groups bring this backwater back to its glory? We think not.
Posted by Harold Davis at January 26, 2005 10:09 AM
