Today, aside from LeWeb, one of the big news stories is that Google Groups is now a part of the Google Enterprise cloud suite of tools. If you’ve never used Groups, it was what happened when Google acquired the foremost and oldest archive of USENET on the web – Dejanews.

I seem to be the only one surprised by this move – particularly at a time when only about a month ago Google Groups was at one of the absolute worst times for it’s public image. About a month and some days ago, I caught a blog post by John Resig entitled “Google Groups is Dead.”

As far as I’m concerned, Google Groups is dead.

For the jQuery project we’ve run all of our community discussions through Google Group mailing lists for the past three years. At this moment the main jQuery group is the second most popular programming group (next to Android developers) clocking in at over 21,000 members.

There is one area in which Google Groups continues to shine: Private, or restricted, mailing list discussions. However any attempts at using it for a public discussion medium are completely futile.

The primary problem with Google Groups boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces.

I remember reading his post and going “amen!” I’ve run a number of Google Groups, going back about five or six years or so, but in the last couple of years, they’ve all become completely unusable due to the insane levels of spam in the system.

Given how effective Google Mail is at blocking spam, I continue to be amazed at how much spam exists within the system. Rather than reporting spam from within the groups infrastructure, most users simply use their web mail client to report the spam, which then blacklists the mailing list address from ever delivering legitimate discussion to their address again.
  

Within Resig’s post, he asserted (something with which I completely agree) that Groups is possibly still useful for private discussions, but anything public facing is useless.

That’s why when I see the public buzz around this offering, I’m completely baffled. Krishnan Subramanian wrote earlier today: “Google groups inside Google Apps are useful not only for internal discussions, it can be used as a customer facing support helpdesk,” and many other reviewers of the service pitched it for that use, too.

It might work as an internal company discussion tool, but it’s going to be a drag on the entire Apps suite’s public image if Google attempts to push it as a viable tool for public facing support.