Yahoo! Groups

From: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yahoo! Groups operate as both electronic mailing lists and Internet forums. Group messages can be posted and read by e-mail or on the Group homepage, like a web forum. Members can choose whether to receive individual e-mails or daily digest e-mails, or to read the posts at the web site. Some Groups are simply announcement lists, to which only the Group moderators can post, while others are discussion lists.

As well as providing e-mail relaying and archiving facilities for the many lists it hosts, the Yahoo! Groups service provides additional functions on the web site, such as voting and calendar systems and file uploading. The basic mailing list functionality is available to any e-mail address, but a Yahoo! ID is required for access to other features.

Yahoo! Groups competitor is Google Groups.


History

Yahoo! Groups was launched in 1998 as a logical extension of services that had already been developed by Yahoo - message boards, calendars, profiles. Yahoo! Groups were first known as Yahoo! Clubs. Unlike previous Yahoo products, this product was designed to allow much deeper levels of user control over creation, membership and overall direction of communities. Development was led by Doug Hirsch (product management) and Matt Jackson (lead engineer), both of whom have since left the company.

Yahoo! Groups quickly grew to be one of the largest traffic-generating products within the Yahoo! network of services; even today the site is typically one of the Top 5 page-view generating sites across the Yahoo network.

In 1999, Yahoo acquired eGroups.com, one of the most popular mailing list products at the time. About 8 months later, Yahoo merged the eGroups.com functionality with Yahoo Groups, resulting in some complaints from users of both services.

Yahoo Groups languished between 2000 and 2005. In 2001 Yahoo! deleted adult groups from its search directory, making it very difficult to locate Yahoo! groups with adult content. A Yahoo! user who wishes to find a group with adult content must therefore either know the exact name of the group, or attempt to find it by using a search engine or one of several online adult group directories. This has created what some view as an "underground" atmosphere for Yahoo! adult groups. While it is unclear whether the intention of Yahoo! was to diminish the number or merely the easy availability of these groups, adult groups on Yahoo! have continued to increase. In 2005, a revived ability to generate revenue through targeted search-related advertising resulted in renewed interest, which has slowly received new features since then.

Offline or Invisible?

When a user seems offline, in fact he/she may be online but with Invisible status (avoiding you?), but Yahoo! Messenger will show him/her as offline (the gray face icon).

Then, how do you know whether he/she is offline or online? Just follow these simple steps carefully. It's really simple.

There are 3 methods:

Method 1: Doodle IMvironment

See the main window of Yahoo! Messenger. An "offline" or "invisible" user will show a gray icon on the left of her name. In this example, we want to see if the user darling is online or not. Double-click on the username.

A message window will open. Send an arbitrary message to the user, or just send a BUZZ!!!. After sending, quickly proceed to step 3.

Click IMVironment button, select See all IMVironments, select Yahoo! Tools or Interactive Fun, and click on Doodle.

4. The last step and the most important step. After loading the Doodle IMVironment, there will be two possibilities.

• If the user is offline, the Doodle area will show "waiting for your friend to load Doodle" continuously, like this:
  
• But if the user is online (in invisible mode), after few seconds (it can take up to one minute, depending on connection speed), you will get a blank page. So the user is online!!!!
  

Method 2: Voice Chat

This method no longer works in Yahoo! Messenger 7. Please use the Doodle method which still works.
See the main window of Yahoo! Messenger. An "offline" or "invisible" user will show a gray icon on the left of the username. Double-click on the username to open this window.

Click on "Voice" icon on the toolbar, or select "Contact" menu and select "Enable Voice Chat" .

3. The deciding part... there are 2 possible result:

• If the user is offline, you will get this message:
  
  
• But if the user is invisible (actually online), you will see the Voice Toolbar (marked red in the picture) like this:
  

Method 3: Conference Invitation

This method no longer works in Yahoo! Messenger 7. Please use the Doodle method which still works.
See the main window of Yahoo! Messenger. An "offline" or "invisible" user will show a gray icon on the left of her name. In this example, we want to see if the user darling is online or not. Right-click on the username.

When the menu appears, select Invite to Conference.

A window will appear. See at the right pane, the username darling will be there. Now, click Invite.

4. The deciding part... there are 2 possible result:

• If the user is offline, you will get this message:
  
  
• But if the user is invisible, you will get a window similar to this: