Forums are dead, long life to groups

At first there was NNTP, a dedicated protocol unfairly killed by firewalls and proxies.

Then came the mighty Mailing lists, with their burdens of mails, daily digest, problems with reply, complicated majordomos and the ultimate lame who cannot unsubscribe from them.

In the Php era, Forums ruled unchallenged. Reasonably easy to setup, with lots of implementations to choose from, full of smileys for every users they seemed the ultimate solution.

But how are they doing now, in this era of Web2.0, Social web and Ajax scripts?

Not so well after all. I’ve tried the “groups” feature of Google Groups, Facebook, Flickr and Mixi, and I found  them much more powerful and flexible of forums.

Especially Facebook groups have a lots of very cool features (privacy levels, officials, the wall, files). It’s hard to imagine more than 4 million of people on a single forum or mailing list!

So cool as a matter of fact, that I decided to implement something similar (but simpler) for my Django project.
Stay tuned…