Uses for Newsgroups
NNTP Technologies Pack More of a Groupware Punch Than You May Think
By Jon Udell
Next year the Usenet will celebrate its 20th anniversary. In 1980 the first two news hosts exchanged messages. Today, commercial providers of Usenet feeds say that a full feed has grown to over 20GB of data every day, and continues to grow at an estimated 10 percent per month. The Usenet is the grandfather of all groupware systems: a planetary discussion network that supports tens of thousands of virtual communities, and pools the knowledge of millions of individuals. It's also a chaotic mess of spam, smut, and nonsense.
The Web, invented more recently, was also intended as a groupware tool. The physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), birthplace of the Web, wanted to be able to collaborate with far-flung colleagues. But when the Web went mainstream in the mid-1990s, it quickly grew to resemble broadcast television more than distributed hypertext authoring. The HTTP PUT method was rarely implemented in servers. The Web browser evolved into a channel clicker, a receiver, and an order-form handler. What about collaboration? According to the latest buzz, Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) will fulfill the Web's collaborative potential. Perhaps it will some day, but it doesn't help us now.
And then there's email. If the Usenet is the grandfather of groupware, Internet mail is the grandmother. It's the messaging backbone that connects all the proprietary email systems, and the standard that all those proprietary systems are now forced to adopt.
