Yep. That was exactly my thought. Everything old is new again. (And Usenet is even still there.) I'm still convinced that Usenet gets ignored precisely becaus

Yep. That was exactly my thought. Everything old is new again. (And Usenet is even still there.) I'm still convinced that Usenet gets ignored precisely because it is federated and mature - it is harder to extract nickels from than a centralized service; user-surveillance and other ad-related choke points are fragmented, it works already, there are already robust end-user filters. (I also believe Twitter should have been an RFC, not a startup.) For anyone who wants to build similar stuff for internal use - NNTP is probably not going to be the right choice unless you have a large number of sites. For a startup, IMAP has everything you need built-in for shared, threaded group messaging that looks a fair-bit like usenet (from the client's perspective). If you don't have strong ideas about UI or workflow, you can use an MTA to read and respond, and you're done. If you want your own UI, there are a huge number of IMAP libraries out there for just about any language you want to use. "Old" tech is a goldmine.