In the 1960s, Timothy Leary urged people to 'Turn on, tune in, drop out.' These days, the hip thing to do is to log on, sign in, hang out. Despite the downturn in fortunes for dot.com companies, more and more people are flocking to the Net and, once they're there, they are coming together with other, similarly-minded folk to create online communities.

If you're serious about connecting to people and building a network of people online, Web-based discussion groups – or egroups – are the way to go. Egroups offer a smorgasbord of communication tools, including electronic bulletin boards, mailing lists and chat rooms, each linked to a particular topic or organisation.

You can use an egroup to:

and a whole lot more.

Globalise your passion

There's nothing new about Internet discussion groups. Such groups have been available in one form or another since the early days of the Internet, certainly since before the birth of the Web. But, as with so many other aspects of the Internet, it is the Web which has fuelled the widespread popularity of the groups. Web-based discussion groups are easy to create and easy to use, managed with point-and-click ease and housed on someone else's Internet server.

Certainly, the dot.com shakeout has had an effect on the number of sites offering roll-your-own egroups, with eCircles a major casualty and eGroups.com gobbled up by Yahoo in 2001. But while the number of sites has diminished, the number of egroups continues to rise.

That's because egroups not only offer a multiplicity of ways to connect with other people, they also let you transform a local interest into a worldwide interest. There may be only one or two others in your neighbourhood who share your passion for collecting Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil monkey figurines – hardly enough to form a club – but you'll find plenty of fellow collectors around the globe, and you can get together, virtually, and share your passion via an egroup.

Yahoo!: Egroup Central

The number of egroups is staggering. Yahoo!, which can comfortably claim the title of Egroup Central, has well over a million.

For some time after Yahoo! ingested eGroups.com, it features both Clubs and Groups. That artificial division has since disappeared, leaving the sole Yahoo! Groups. As well as chat rooms and mailing lists, Yahoo! Groups let you create group calendars, share files and bookmarks, run opinion polls, and use an online database to create a group contact list, CD library, FAQ (frequently asked questions list), inventory system or custom-designed database. That set of features makes Yahoo! Groups stand out from the crowd.

MSN's groups

Microsoft's MSN is home to another bustling set of egroups. The MSN egroups get the benefit of heavy traffic visiting the MSN site every day. There are hundreds of thousands of groups, organised into categories ranging from Home & Families to Science & History.

While there are plenty of active groups with broad membership, MSN's listings also includes tens of thousands of so-called groups which are merely personal Web sites. For instance, the Places & Travel category includes over 50,000 groups in the Vacation Photos section. Some of these function as real communities, like the 4500-member Hawaiian vacation photo group; others are merely personal snapshot collections placed online.

MSN Groups are easy to set up, but unfortunately the site has done away with its excellent collection of community templates which added style to its groups. Still, all you need to do is answer a few questions and you'll be presented with a skeleton group with most of the elements you need. You can then add new components – chat room, group calendar, photo album, and so on – and customise your group's home page.

It's easy to add new pages and features to an MSN Group.

Topica

Topica pools newsletters and discussion groups. If you're after information about a particular topic but don't want to engage in discussion, then you can sign up for a newsletter. Head to the discussion groups for a more interactive experience. Many groups, in fact, have a related newsletter, and you can subscribe to both. Topica's groups lack the extras, such as chat and photo galleries, you'll find in some of the other sites. If you don't mind the lack of those added personal touches, you'll find the groups themselves easy to use and neatly fronted by Topica's well organised Directory.

Finding a group

The first step in joining a group is finding the one that's right for you. Each of the egroup sites provides a directory of groups, through which you can click and browse, and a search engine for tracking down specific groups.

Using MSN's search is an exercise in frustration, because it searches both groups and personal home pages. For example, a search for 'buttons' turns up 83 matches, but almost all of them are personal pages. Even worse, MSN's templates are used for both groups and personal sites, making the two close to indistinguishable.

Topica, on the other hand, has a much smarter search engine, which lets you use Boolean searches such as buttons AND sewing, buttons NOT sewing, "old buttons" OR "antique buttons", and so on. Yahoo!, too, lets you use Boolean searches (although it doesn't support the NOT operator).

Choosing a group

Once you've done a search, take a look at the matching groups. Some groups make you sign up before you can read any messages; others let you read messages as a guest, but restrict the ability to contribute ('post') messages to members; still others are completely open to the public.

If you can read the group's messages, take a look around and see what you think. Each group has its own flavour, and it's important to find one which matches your needs. The group's theme may be perfect, but the tone of the messages may put you off.

Even with the closed groups where you can't see the messages, the group description may be enough to let you know whether the group will suit you. If not, you can always e-mail the group owner (you'll find the address on the group's home page) and ask for an expanded description.

You should also check the activity level of the group. How many members are there? How many postings on the group's message board? You may prefer a small group in which each member regularly contributes to a mass group dominated by a few voices. You may want the stimulation of hundreds of daily messages or a more stately flow of communication.

Watch out, though, for groups with minimal activity. Such moribund egroups abound, and unless you plan to be the firecracker which sets the group alight, you'll do better to look elsewhere.

Joining a group

Once you've found a group you wish to join, sign up. If the group has one, make your first point of call the FAQ. The FAQ provides answers to commonly asked questions, and you'll make yourself far more welcome in the group if you do your own research by reading the FAQ first, instead of posting a message directly to the group.

Read through old posts, too, to get your bearings and see the types of topics covered previously.

Participating

The centrepiece of most egroups is an electronic bulletin board or mailing list, where members exchange messages. Anyone in the group can read, post and reply to messages. You can follow along and participate either on the Web or via e-mail.

If you choose to receive your message via e-mail, you can usually select whether you want to receive a daily digest summarising the messages for that day or a separate e-mail for every message posted. Make sure you suss out the average number of posts per day before selecting the latter method, or you'll find your inbox quickly stuffed to capacity.

You'll get the most out of an egroup if you join in the discussion and spark discussion topics yourself.

A sample egroup home page

A typical egroup home page, complete with calendar, message board and links to other resources, at Yahoo! Groups.

Rolling your own group

If you prefer to build your own egroup, the process is not much harder than joining a group. For example, to create a new group at Yahoo! Groups:

Once your group is established, your first priority should be to create a welcome message in which you state the purpose of the group and encourage people to participate.

10 tips for egroup success

Don't let your egroup become yet another 'community of one'. Successful egroups require three main ingredients: the fulfillment of a real need for community, active membership and effective management.

Here are 10 tips to help ensure your group's a rocket and not a squib:

  1. Don't blindly duplicate an existing group. If there's a similar group already going well, join up and participate instead of starting a rival venture. If an existing group isn't going well, try to access whether your active participation might be all that's needed to ignite it.
  2. Provide a clear description of your group's purpose for the group directory. This description will be most people's first contact with your group, so make it sharp, concise and distinctive.
  3. Provide a welcome message that sets the tone for the group.
  4. Welcome each new member when they join. If your group is very large, you can create a welcome e-mail which you send to anyone who joins.
  5. Seed the discussion board with thoughtful, informative or provocative messages.
  6. Add extra content, such as links to useful resources or a bibliography.
  7. Respond to posts from others.
  8. Invite like-minded friends to join.
  9. Promote your group. Make sure your group appears in the directory and check out other advertising and promotional resources provided by some egroup venues. You may also wish to advertise your group on other groups or mailing lists, as long as you're not trying to poach members.
  10. 'Establish rules of engagement' for group participation and be prepared to turf out those who don't abide by them. A single foul-tempered, bad-mouthed lout can put a real damper on the flow of communication in some groups. Other groups may regard such a participant as a lively asset. Make it clear from the start which type of group yours is.

Egroup Sites

Yahoo! Groups

Yahoo! Groups Australia

MSN Groups

Topica 

© 2002  Rose Vines

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