This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Peter G Provost. Original Post: New Google Groups Feed Title: Peter Provost's Geek Noise Feed URL: /error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Rss.aspx Feed Description: Technology news, development articles, Microsoft .NET, and other stuff... Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Peter G Provost Latest Posts From Peter Provost's Geek Noise

I assume everyone noticed that Google Groups switched over to their new interface. I like it and dislike it at the same time…

• I like that threads open by default. I don’t like that I don’t see the thread tree anymore.
• I like that it looks more like Gmail, but I don’t like that you can’t use Gmail keystrokes and that you can’t collapse posts by clicking their headers (as you can in Gmail).
• I don’t really find any value in all that wasted space on the left side. But I also don’t use Google Groups to subscribe or post, so maybe this is for those people. I should be able to collapse it.

Also, you can’t browse the newsgroup heirarchy from a post anymore. For example, I used to search for something, say, C# related. The I could click one of the newsgroup names from a specific post (e.g. microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp). Then from the group’s main page, I could browse up and down the tree by clicking the parts of the name (e.g. clicking the word dotnet allowed me to browse up to microsoft.public.dotnet).

By the way, event though it is on a new URL (http://groups-beta.google.com), you can’t actually use the old one (http://groups.google.com) to get around these deficiencies. As soon as you do a search in the old, you end up on the new search results page.

All in all, I give it a C+. Needs improvement.