Groups on the Internet has been available from the very beginning. It has been ever since the BBS Networks exist as far as I know & those network where before the Internet. Then one of the most notable ones that appeared were the Yahoo Groups followed by many other services which tried to be portals, then forums shaped, Google Groups appeared & so forth (I might be wrong on the history in here but the point is “Groups have been very popular at all the levels).
Here is a list of some of different model of groups currently exist on the web: Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Facebook Groups, Friendfeed Rooms, & so on.
Groups in fact are smaller communities of the people who have at least one common interest which they would like to share their activities & information & knowledge around it (The best Wikipedia Description for it could be probably this one)
Groups on the Internet has happened for whatever reasons, they have been always fragmented & they formed in a command & control model. The problem was there were no standard model. In all of the groups, there has been someone who first creates the group & becomes the one who have the full power over the group. If the group gets popular, there is going to be form all sorts of similar ones pops up around it & many will form unknowingly that such a group has ever existed. This makes all of the coversations fragmented & not to give the real attentions which deserve to be given to any very interesting & popular topic.
There is also another problem which is the lack of groups for all of any sorts of interest which makes the people to give less attention to those groups out there since they could not find the one they are looking for & they do not have the courage to take the pain of creating one & waiting till it becomes popular (there also pain on how to learn create one).
Now, each of those issues are serious problems which has never let the groups to take off to their full potentil.
Groups could have huge value for the people since we could gain lots of new amazing things from the people who have the common interest with us in any topic which we are passionate about. They are particularly very helpful with the current diversity of information on the web which has made discoverying the information really hard & search is not enough since there are many times which we really do not know what we are looking more apart from if we are getting really the best result for our search terms. Some of the content discovery tools such as StumbleUpon or similar services have been created for addressing this issue which they have gone so far since creating the right algorithm is challenging & since the core issue here is structure.
There are number of approaches being made to address this issue which I am going to explain in the next post.
