Communication Services within Groups

USENET, which originated in 1980, gradually became obsolete and was largely replaced by more modern platforms for news and communication during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Several factors contributed to its decline:

1. Rise of the World Wide Web (Mid-1990s): The web's user-friendly interface, graphical capabilities, and hyperlinked nature provided a more accessible and interactive way to consume information compared to USENET’s text-based, command-line-driven environment. Web-based news sources, forums, and portals like Yahoo News and CNN.com emerged as easier ways to access current events.
2. Email and Mailing Lists: By the mid-to-late 1990s, email services like AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail became more prevalent. These services offered mailing lists and news alerts that allowed users to keep up with current events without using USENET.
3. Rise of Forums and Bulletin Boards (Late 1990s - Early 2000s): Dedicated web-based discussion forums (such as phpBB and vBulletin) began to replace USENET as places for community interaction, allowing more structured and moderated discussions.
4. Blogs and News Aggregators (Early 2000s): The rise of blogs, powered by platforms like Blogger and WordPress, became another major alternative for accessing news and commentary. News aggregators like RSS readers allowed people to follow multiple sources in real-time, effectively replacing USENET for news consumption.
5. Social Media (Mid-2000s Onwards): The dominance of platforms like Facebook (founded in 2004) and Twitter (founded in 2006) marked the definitive decline of USENET as a place to access real-time news and discussions. These platforms allowed rapid sharing, discussion, and aggregation of news in a much more user-friendly and interactive manner.

By the mid-2000s, most users had shifted away from USENET to these newer platforms, and while some niche communities continued to use it, USENET's role in current news discussions and mainstream communication had mostly faded.

All news traveling over the Internet is called Netnews (or Network News) and can be read using a Web browser or a newsreader such as nn, rn, trn, or tin.
Understandably, many businesses block or limit access to USENET. User Network (USENET) is a public access network that was developed as a bulletin board by two U.S. universities. Referred to as USENET, the organization is responsible for the registration, collection, and distribution of newsgroups around the world. A newsgroup, is a bulletin board hosted by USENET. All visitor postings to any of the 36,000 currently registered newsgroups are send to USENET servers where they are broadcast to thousands of ISPs around the world. When visiting a newsgroup, the user is actually receiving its contents from their ISP, not USENET. A discussion group looks and functions exactly like a newsgroup, the only real difference is a discussion group is hosted privately (it is not registered with USENET). The host can be any Web site, and modern Web editors, such as FrontPage, make the creation of a discussion group quite simple to develop.

• List Server (LISTSERV): LISTSERV is an automated message list server organized by subject. It allows Internet users to subscribe to (and to unsubscribe from) mailing lists by email. Colleges and other organizations often use the lists to post group mail.
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC): IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is used to connect multiple computers in Internet chat sessions. People convene in a public area called a channel, or chat room, where they can communicate in real time by typing messages back and forth. To use IRC, you need an Internet connection and IRC client software. One of many sites that list IRC software (including free applications) as well as a channel guide is http://sg.pacnet.com/
  You can search the Web for IRC software, as well as for lists of chat sites and their focuses. Also useful are sites listing the emoticons, symbols composed of punctuation marks and letters used to convey emotions and acronyms commonly used as chat room shorthand to save time and keystrokes. The following section discusses USENET, LISTSERV, and IRC.

1. Internet Relay Chat (IRC): Connects multiple computers in public areas called channels where subscribers communicate in real time
2. List Server (LISTSERV): Sends subject-specific emails to a group of email recipients
3. User Network (USENET): Facilitates newsgroups and bulletin boards about particular topics and is generally maintained by volunteers

• Basic, Services, Portals: The Internet is a system of computer networks designed to send and receive data. This module explains the basic concepts of Internet navigation. It explains
  
  1. what the Internet is,
  2. the infrastructure (both hardware and software) needed to access it, and
  3. the services and facilities available.
  Internet navigation includes the use of communication services such as electronic mail (e-mail), listserv and mailing lists, news groups, (IRC) Internet relay chat, downloading services such as file transfer protocol (FTP), and search services like the World Wide Web.
• Internet Services that support Electronic Commerce: Electronic mail (e-mail), Internet relay chat (IRC), instant messenger, and the Internet phone are among the services offered by the Internet that could enhance a successful e-commerce program. In this module a brief overview of these services are presented. e-mail is one of the most popular services available on the Internet. Using e-mail a user can create a letter electronically and send it over communications media. New products and services can be announced to the customers using e-mail and confirmations can be sent using e-mail. In addition, many business communications can be effectively performed using e-mail. When a user sends an e-mail, the message usually stays in the recipient's computer until he or she reads it. In many e-mail systems, the receiver is able to store the e-mail message in an electronic folder for future reference. E-mail is fast and will get to the recipient's computer in a matter of seconds or minutes. The only thing required in order to send an e-mail message is the e-mail address of a recipient on the Internet. A user can also send a single e-mail message to a group of people at the same time. A user can apply all the word processing tasks such as spell checking and grammar correction before sending the e-mail message. Document files and/or multimedia files can be attached to an e-mail message and a user could ask for delivery notification. With e-mail a user can usually establish various folders with different contents and send a particular e-mail to a specific group. Using e-mail enables a user to establish an effective message distribution system for advertising products and services.

The Internet brings together people with diverse backgrounds and interests. Discussion groups that share opinions and ideas facilitate this. Each person in a discussion group can post messages or articles that can be accessed and read by others in the group. Newsgroups can be established for any topic or hobby and allow people to get together for fun and entertainment or for business purposes. For example, a user may join a newsgroup interested in object technology, or a user may join a newsgroup that can help in writing and debugging a computer program in a specific programming language such as C++. Newsgroups can serve as an effective advertising medium in an e-commerce environment when using the Amazon Advertising API.
(IRC) Internet relay chat enables a user to interactively communicate in a written form with other users from all over the world. It is similar to a coffee shop where people sit around a table and start chatting. The two major differences between this electronic coffee shop and a real coffee shop are that there is no coffee and the user does not see the people that he/she is chatting with. However, a user is able to participate in many different discussions with people anywhere in the world who have the same interest.

• IRC:
  Instant messenger is a communication service that enables a user to create a private chat room with another user. Different instant messengers offer different capabilities. They typically alert a user whenever somebody on his/her private list is online, then a user may initiate a chat session with that particular individual. Internet telephony is the use of the Internet rather than the traditional telephone company infrastructure and rate structure to exchange spoken or other telephone information. Because access to the Internet is available at local phone connection rates, an international or other long-distance call will be much less expensive than through the traditional calling arrangement. This could be a major cost saving for an e-commerce site offering hotline services, help desk.

In the next lesson, you will learn about other technologies that enable you to access data on the Web.