Here’s some interesting Google news that hasn’t really been covered anywhere yet (except in Google’s blog): Google Groups is now out of Beta. I’ve never understood how a particular product gets out of “beta”, but I’ll take extra features with a smile. From the post:
Now you can customize the look of your group, create and edit web pages, upload and share files (including photos), and view member profiles. And for your discussions, there’s no need to struggle to follow interrupted conversations, as Google Groups now includes the same style of organization that Gmail users love.
This reminded me of something Sergey Brin said a few months ago:
What we are concerned about is that if we continue to develop so many new individual products that are all their assorted silos, you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them… There’s a whole set of initiatives that’s now going on in the Company to make our product offerings simpler and more consistent for all of our users.
The newest features in Groups shows this commitment. From the tour, I pulled two images. One shows an interface that looks and acts just like Gmail.
It even has Adsense on the right side!
Another image shows something that is strikingly similar to Google’s Page Creator.
Google has taken their groups concept and given it a turbo boost.
Simply looking at these two examples of technology integration, we should expect an event organizer in the near future that syncs with your Google Calendar as well as Web Album integration for publishing photos. One of the most obvious integration with Google Maps is missing, and I hope we can see that in the near future. There are many, many ways they can do this as demonstrated by the web-soup of Gmaps mashups out there. Most particularly, member and event locations comes to mind. Lastly, I’d love to see further integration of Gchat, much in the same way as they have done in Gmail. Being able to do group chatting on the web would be cool. Well, realistically, Gchat should work anywhere on Google.com so long as you are logged in…
Someday, I’ll use Groups to organize my poker games, but until I see integration with Google Calendar, I think I’ll continue using mailing lists. Having a centralized way to group up a recurring event is exactly what Calendar needs, while a way to better coordinate “when and where” is what Groups needs. Let’s cross our fingers and hope somebody is listening.