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Yahoo! Groups was a service from Yahoo! that provides electronic mailing lists. Over the years, Yahoo! bought several other mailing list providers, including the popular eGroups, and combined them with Yahoo! Clubs into one system. Yahoo! Groups is now the most popular and best-known provider of electronic mailing lists. Its main competitor is Google Groups.
As well as providing e-mail relaying and archiving facilities for the many lists it hosts, the Yahoo! Groups service provides additional functions on the website, such as voting and calendar systems and file uploading. The basic mailing list functionality is available to any e-mail address, but a Yahoo! ID is required for access to other features.
Yahoo! Groups operate as both electronic mailing lists and Internet forums. Group messages can be posted and read by e-mail or on the Group homepage, like a forum. Members can choose whether to receive individual e-mails or daily digest e-mails, or to read the posts at the website. Some Groups are simply announcement lists, to which only the Group moderators can post, while others are discussion lists.
History
Yahoo! Groups was launched in 1998 as a logical extension of services that had already been developed by Yahoo - message boards, calendars, profiles. Yahoo! Groups were first known as Yahoo! Clubs. Unlike previous Yahoo products, this product was designed to allow much deeper levels of user control over creation, membership and overall direction of communities. Development was led by Doug Hirsch (product management) and Matt Jackson (lead engineer), both of whom have since left the company.
Yahoo! Groups quickly grew to be one of the largest traffic-generating products within the Yahoo! network of services; even today the site is typically one of the Top 5 page-view generating sites across the Yahoo network.
In 1999, Yahoo acquired eGroups.com, one of the most popular mailing list products at the time. About 8 months later, Yahoo merged the eGroups.com functionality with Yahoo Groups, resulting in some complaints from users of both services.
Yahoo Groups languished between 2000 and 2005. In 2001 Yahoo! deleted adult groups from its search directory, making it very difficult to locate Yahoo! groups with adult content. A Yahoo! user who wishes to find a group with adult content must therefore either know the exact name of the group, or attempt to find it by using a search engine or one of several online adult group directories, such as www.adultgroupfinder.com . This has created what some view as an "underground" atmosphere for Yahoo! adult groups. While it is unclear whether the intention of Yahoo! was to diminish the number or merely the easy availability of these groups, adult groups on Yahoo! have continued to increase. In 2005, a revived ability to generate revenue through targeted search-related advertising resulted in renewed interest, which has slowly received new features since then.
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