Ditch Google and Facebook Groups and Use Them Instead
Trying to find the best tool for organizing a group of people and sharing knowledge can be a challenge. Google Groups can seem extremely complex. Facebook cares little about your privacy. And if you still use Yahoo Groups … why ? Instead of the Big Three, consider a service like Groups.io , a sensible free platform that’s incredibly easy to use.
For some background, Group.io was founded by Mark Fletcher, who has extensive experience with online collaboration services. In 1998, he founded ONElist, which later became eGroups, which were then acquired by Yahoo and transformed into what we now know as Yahoo Groups, primarily by name and defender of the kingdom.
Fletcher left Yahoo after the acquisition, but he never gave up on groups, as he described in a 2014 blog post announcing the launch of the Groups.io beta:
“Yahoo Groups and Google Groups exude a raw air of harmless neglect. Google Groups hasn’t been updated in years, and some of Yahoo’s recent changes have actually made Yahoo Groups worse! Yet millions of people put up with this uncertainty and neglect because email groups are still one of the best ways to communicate with groups of people. And I have a plan to make them even better. “
So what makes Groups.io great?
Groups.io costs nothing *
For most people, it won’t cost you a dime to create a simple online group on a service that can include any number of members. This makes Groups.io as expensive as Yahoo Groups and Google Groups, and you also get one added bonus: no ads. Groups.io does not stuff your browser with nonsense and does not use your group data to then serve you personalized ads.
* Groups.io is a freemium product , so you can pay extra for extra features like extra storage for your group (beyond the free gigabyte you get), the ability to directly add new members without their approval, RSVP tracking for events, or fully customizable home page for your large group. We don’t mind – everyone should make a living – as its free features are extensive enough for most people.
For newbies, Groups.io is pretty handy.
If you have no idea what you are doing, managing a new online discussion group may seem a little daunting to you. Groups.io has a lot of configuration options, but the service does a good job of adapting itself. Once you create a new group, you will receive a helpful little welcome message that will tell you a little about how groups work and point you to where you can start experimenting with your group configuration.
More importantly, all the basic settings for your group are in one simple submenu: Settings. You don’t have to wade through the countless menus, sections, and subheadings in the sidebar to make sure everything in your group is customized to your liking. Just click on “Settings”. Adjust some parameters. Continue scrolling down. Once you hit the bottom of the settings page, that’s it. Ready.
The Groups.io group starts with everything you need
Starting a group on an online service is like making dinner. Sometimes you get a huge serving of the main course and you need to ask for a side dish or two. Sometimes you are told that the kitchen is closed and there is only meat on the menu. With Groups.io, you get a full meal every time you start a new group.
By that, I mean your new group will be fully equipped with all the features you are likely to need: built-in chat service (in addition to your group’s standard email messages), hashtags for group storage. organized messages, a built-in calendar for displaying and managing group events, a handy dump for files and photos, and even a built-in Wiki that you can use to provide additional information about your group (or topics related to your group’s activities).
Power users get a lot of third-party connections
If you’re looking for a little fun, Groups.io can team up with a number of other popular services to help you manage your group in even smarter ways. First, the basics: you can set up special “receive-only” email addresses for your group, and Groups.io can automatically add a specific hashtag to messages sent to each email address to keep things simpler to organize.
If you have a Facebook page that you used to track a group or project, you can set it up so that whatever you post to that page is also automatically posted to your group. The same is true for RSS feeds – any content that goes into the feed can be automatically uploaded to your group – as well as for Trello, which can ping your group with a post whenever new activity appears on one of your boards. … You can even integrate Groups.io with Github and receive messages whenever a new code commit appears in your project.
And if that’s not enough, Groups.io syncs with Slack. As long as a person is a member of one organization – your Slack or Groups.io – they will be members of another organization. And if that changes, they will be automatically deleted at the next (hourly) sync.
Going from Google or Yahoo is easy
If you want to switch from any of the platforms, Groups.io has a pretty quick and automatic way to reset your Google or Yahoo group membership and import it into Groups.io. The whole process takes about a day at most. For Yahoo Groups, Groups.io will also capture all posts in your group, but not attachments, and import them into your new Groups.io group.