|
|
Yahoo's Group
by Jocelyn Doire
Ever wanted to organize a family reunion,
a support group or any other kind of meeting involving lots of people spread
all over the place? To do that you use the old method of using the mail
or the phone, but both are slow and potentially expensive. Alternatively
you could use the Internet and create a web site, but it’s not everyone
who has the knowledge and the time to create an attractive web site. When
my high school class decided to make their “conventum”, that is a reunion
of all those who graduated 20 years ago, they used the group feature offered
by Yahoo.
The first thing you need to do is to open
an account for yourself if you don’t already have one, for that go to
http://groups.yahoo.com/
(or http://fr.groups.yahoo.com for the French version), select Click here
to register and fill in the forms. Read carefully what’s there, or you
may end up with something you don’t want, for example on the second page,
I did not want to “Yes, personalize my browser with Yahoo! Companion toolbar”,
so I removed the check mark there. If you have trouble with what you get
from Yahoo, don’t ask me, asks Yahoo!
The second step is to create the group,
for that, click on Start a new Group!, which should bring you to
http://groups.yahoo.com/start.
If you are a new user, you will get a message saying that you need to verify
your Yahoo email address, follow the instructions; click on “here”, then
“Non-verified”, then “send verification”. When you get the confirmation
message, get the verification code and enter it with your password, click
on verify, click on Continue using Yahoo!, re-enter your password once
again and fill in the member detail form, and finally click on “finished”.
If you are like me, you will probably have to repeat some of the steps
(or all of them…), just re-read the screens and follow the step until you
are verified member, and then go to http://groups.yahoo.com/start.
To create the group you need to tell Yahoo what kind of group you are, in
my example I selected “”, then “Education”. I could have refined further
the type but I thought it was enough and I clicked on Place my group in
Education. On the second page you can type the name of the group, the description,
the email address of the group and a few options like whether the group
is moderated or not. On the third page you can select your profile and
email address. Finally on the fourth page, you can enter the emails of
the members of your group, the welcome message and how you want to subscribe
the your members. If everything went OK, you will now have a group web
page (for example http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OPCUG_Demo), and a group
email (for example: OPCUG_Demo@yahoogroups.com).
Now the fun part begins!
With your group web page you can:
-
Send invitations to anyone to register to
the group (click on invite)
-
Send messages to all the members of the group
(click on post)
-
Read the messages posted by the members (click
on messages)
-
Create polls (click on polls, create poll,
enter the question and the choices)
-
Create a photo album (click on photos, create
album)
-
Create a database, for example one with phone
number (click on database)
-
Create a calendar of the events (click on
calendar)
-
Chat with members that are online (click on
chat)
-
and more.
The most difficult part for me was to register
to Yahoo using the web interface, but you can make the whole process much
easier to your members by sending invite messages, which will allow registering
by simply replying to the invite. Obviously you have to be careful to not
annoy your members, and depending on the level of trust or knowledge, you
may need to become the moderator to filter the messages.
This is a great service offered by Yahoo,
and for the price of some ads, it can make the organization of your meetings
so much easier, and help to keep all the members well informed in near
real time.
If you have the time, why don’t you take
a look at the group web page I created and try the little surveys I did at
http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/OPCUG_Demo/polls?
You can easily subscribe
by sending an empty email to OPCUG_Demo-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
and by replying to it. Note that you will get all the messages that are
posted on the group’s site. To unsubscribe, send an empty email to OPCUG_Demo-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com.
Bottom Line:
Yahoo's Group (Free service)
Yahoo
http://groups.yahoo.com/
Originally published: February, 2002
top of page
|
Archived Reviews
A-J
K-Q
R-Z
The opinions expressed in these reviews
do not necessarily represent the views of the
Ottawa PC Users' Group or its members.
|
