Usenet was one of the first widely-deployed internetwork-based group communication applications 0
Electronic mail is one of the “stalwarts” of message transfer on the modern Internet, but is really designed only for communication within a relatively small group of specific users. There are many situations in which e-mail is not ideally suited, such as when information needs to be shared amongst a large number of participants, not all of whom may necessarily even know each other. One classic example of this is sharing news; the person providing news often wants to make it generally available to anyone who is interested, rather than specifying a particular set of recipients.
Read the rest of this entry →