Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles: Usenet
The sad thing is that if Google had had the foresight to build in decent browsing, filtering etc., and polish up NNTP a bit, they could own the vast internet message board space, and we would be reading this on alt.hacking.ycombinator or suchlike.<p>It's not that people aren't interested in chatting to each other on the internet, I waste depressingly large quantities of time reading and posting in 5-6 different forums, this being one of them. There's still one usenet group I read regularly, but it's degraded to 50% spam and embittered ranting from an unhappy kibo clone.