> The thing with google groups is, it's not really a walled garden -- it's just a mailing lis Yes and no. It's not much of a mailing list for the people with

> The thing with google groups is, it's not really a walled garden -- it's just a mailing lis Yes and no. It's not much of a mailing list for the people without Google accounts who couldn't figure out how to subscribe after Google made the documentation for doing that hard to find (they used to have a decent page about it that was removed). That's quite different from other mailing lists. Thus the anecdote about someone who asked how to subscribe, which was solved by a group admin manually subscribing them. I'm certain we lost a number of other people who didn't want to bother an admin enough to ask for help, and just gave up. What we found over time is, eventually, a lot of the people reading the group thought it was a forum, and either posted via the Google Groups web interface (never using email), or didn't post (and therefore interact) because clicking the Post button took them to the Google login/signup page, and that put some of them off. > Anything is a mess if you need to keep track of lots of events. Has Facebook figured out how to make calendars non-confusing? I find Meetup ok for this, because I can see in chronological order what I found interesting today and in the next week or so. It tells me what's the next event I signed up to. And I can see a good selection in chronological order that I might like to take an interest in, because I signed up to a bunch of groups. Facebook events also seems to be ok if you are only ever invited to very few events on it, as I am. I still miss them because I only login about once every 2 months these days :-)