Community spaces – Yahoo! Groups

Yahoo! Groups is a free (ad supported) resource which includes a whole stack of features. Again the fine print says that it’s not designed for commercial purposes.

Features

You can create your own online community space. This takes about 5 minutes as it’s web based (so no downloads) and your log in and password details will be emailed to you. When you create your own community you get your own web space with discussion board, listserv, chat, calendar, notice board, photos, database, polls, file uploads (5 megabyte per file limit) and RSS feed. Messages posted to the discussion board are emailed to you and can be replied to from your email box.

Cost

Free

What it's used for

I use the listserv feature mainly and for showing people a range of tools in small group work. I also belong and contribute to a number of listserv communities using Yahoo! Groups, as a professional development opportunity for myself.

Why it's good

Good help, easy to use, stable.

Problems/downside

Can’t use it for commercial purposes, ads get in the way and because Yahoo! has so many features it’s easy to become lost initially. Attachments to messages aren’t archived.

Examples to check out (places to play are marked with an *)

• Just visit the Yahoo! Groups - http://groups.yahoo.com/ site and check out the features.

Alternatives

ICQ

Criteria/factors re tools and processes-Yahoo! Groups

Criteria		Comment
User friendly	Fairly	Reasonably easy to set up and use. Don’t need to go through a 3rd party.
Push or pull in kind	Both	Messages are emailed to you (and can respond from them) but need to go to the site to access full features.
low or high interaction with participants/facilitators	High	Good potential for high interaction
synchronous or asynchronous activity,	Both	Has synchronous chat as well as asynchronous features.
facilitator skills of a low or high level	Both	Fairly easy to set up and use but need higher skills to make full use of features
Participant skills of a low or high level	Low	Friendly interface (except for ads) so easy to use. Only confusing part can be that Yahoo! offers so much.