Free Publishing Platform For Mailing And Discussion Lists: Google Groups 2

If you are looking for a quick, clean, reliable and easy-to-use solution to send out your newsletter or to maintain an email/Web-based discussion list, you may want to consider giving a try to the free Google Groups 2 service, now in Beta, but ready to be put to good use. The service which greatly resembles a much simplified and cleaned-up version of Yahoo Groups (formerly eGroups) integrates for now only the capability to create a distribution list and to easily add members and post/send messages through it. Each discussion group or mailing list, as you may have very different uses for this, generates automatically an RSS feed (Atom format) which can be read by most RSS newsreaders and aggregators. Search, which is integrated in this free service should provide a uniquely performing service. eWeek reported last week: "Google Groups 2, the service builds on Google's archive of more than 845 million Usenet postings and adds the ability for users to create and manage their own public and private mailing lists. It also offers faster indexing of postings for search and features for joining groups and tracking hot topics." In this way, Google can not only provide access and search across on eof the largest humanly contributed discussion and news forums but it now provides the main basic infrastructure to keep on doing this with better tools and facilities. "...like Gmail, Google Groups 2 includes text-based ads alongside postings when viewed through the Web interface."