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.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.