"Big Fish, Little Fish, Yahoo Fish, Google Fish"

02/12/2001

Wow. No, really, I mean "WOW!!". I read the newsgroup this morning from MyDeja.com, as I often do and even posted a message about a friend's birthday. Then about two hours later, I go back to check it again and it's gone. No, not my post... the whole, DAMN Dejanews site! Evidently this morning Google.com acquired the rights to all of Deja's newsgroup and email accounts. This in and of itself is not so shocking. I mean it's the Law of Nature as well as the law of the internet that big companies will swallow up little companies to get bigger so they in turn can swallow up even bigger companies. I give you the recent acquiring of OneList.com by eGroups.com, which was then eaten by Yahoo.com.

What I object to and what really chaffs my ass is the apparent lack of concern or regard for the enduser in all this. When Yahoo decided to snack on eGroups, at least they provided a way for the enduser to make the change over smoothly. Granted if you didn't already have a Yahoo email account, you had to create one, but at least they didn't completely fuck up the main point of their newly acquired service on the first day.

Yes, in my opinion that's exactly what Google has done. Sure you can search for messages in a given newsgroup, but it's presented in the same list format as any other websearch. No threading, no logical message grouping... just a huge, fourteen page list of message dating back to August of 2000. AND the messages that they do list... aren't even current. When I did my search on AFR, the latest message I got was from Sunday.... probably fifty messages behind what everyone else could see. AND they don't have a system in place to POST to the various newsgroups... HELLO?? You'd think someone would have thought to do that BEFORE slathering Deja with tartar sauce, topping it a yellow slice of processed cheese food, wrapping it in paper and sliding it down into a metal bin heated by lamps.*sigh* Oh well... I guess it's true that you get what you pay for.

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