Nexo: Yahoo Groups Killer

by on January 31, 2007

OK, I’ve been walking the aisles meeting with tons of companies and this is the first one that motivated me to pull my laptop out and blog it right from the company’s booth. OK, Zoho’s Notebook got close, but that won’t be out until March, so didn’t feel the pressure to tell you about it RIGHT NOW.

Nexo changes all that. Think Yahoo groups. But done right. I’m here in the Nexo booth talking with Craig Jorasch, CEO of Nexo.

I can’t explain it all. I’ll get a video with them, but every part of their service is better than Yahoo’s groups. Their look. The way you can add images. The fact that they have RSS and Atom and OPML support. The way you can layout the group’s pages. The way it sends out email and integrates different events into email. The polls that you can add.

It’s all better than Yahoo.

I’m going to use this. In fact, let me start a group right now and see how long it takes me to get started.  It took about 20 seconds. No weird Yahoo ID needed.

My group is here: http://scobleizer.nexo.com/

One thing I learned that isn’t quite ready yet is a public group for a site like mine. I have to invite you into my group as a member before you can send messages or participate in my group. That’ll change next week.

Either way, this is a great demonstration of what happens when Web 2.0 technologies gets applied to an old problem of how groups of people can interact with each other.

  • Ok Robert i invited you to be my 'friend' because all other methods over the last few days have failed ;-)...i will be your friend if you be mine, but you are right it generates another email response which you of course don't have time to get to.

    http://danielabarbosa.nexo.com/
  • Yahoo seem to have a thing with ID's at the moment...
  • Nexo site seems to be very slow. I suppose a lot of people are hitting it now, but still this is not a good sign for the product.
  • Cool, performance was dragging you must have started a mass rush to sign up :-) in fact it's just died on my 3 times...

    http://ccmehil.nexo.com
  • Better than Google Groups? The Big G recently revamped the groups interface and it's way better than Yahoo's offering. Clean design and some nice customization available. Plus if you have a

    More and more my Google ID is becoming my online identity. Since I use Google Apps for Your Domain it's my own email at my own domain. No need for a goofy Gmail or Yahoo id.
  • Ditto. As far as I know Google groups is now feature for feature a match for Yahoo groups. (Until recently you had to change the URL to groups-beta or something to get the new features). You can use it like a mailing list, like a Wiki, a web page, or a file storage area. Of course there ARE some limits on how much stuff you can store, but the limits are larger than Yahoo's and the service doesn't carry a lot of bulky ads.

    I'm quite sure an upstart company can run circles around both Yahoo and Google. The question is will they still be around in a year and will performance be acceptable in the mean time. The more competition the merrier though. I think Yahoo will suffer from the competition before Google will.

    Somebody please buy Yahoo and make them not suck so much!
  • Thanks for the kind words.

    Sorry for the interval with performance problems. We had a glitch with a server that required restarting and the problem went away. Our fault for not catching it in the rush to get ready for DEMO.
  • Actually, the new Google Groups is by far superior to Yahoo Groups. It's no longer just group emailing, it's a mini-collaboration platform.  That said, group email is a key function, and for that you need robust infrastructure.    Better products my come up by startups, but the robustness that Google can offer will secure it's place as THE group email (oh, yeah, Yahoo, too, although it s*cks)
  • Dan
    Nexo looks good, I'll give it that, but for messaging it lacks quite a bit in comparison to Yahoo! Groups. Unless I'm missing something.

    There's no central store of messages, no email addresses for groups (ie send an email to mynewgroup@nexo.com and it will be sent to all members), and if you're sent a message, the reply goes straight to that user - faster yes, but there's no logging.

    I didn't realise that Google had revamped their Groups though, will check that out next.
  • Keith
    IMO, all you need to do to be better than Yahoo Groups is to not require user login for half the links you click.
  • I am experimenting with it for a local collaboration, and it seems pretty good. The founders/designers are very receptive to feedback.
  • Quiet honestly, I think NEXO is more on the lines of social networking than group mailing. When I signup at NEWO, I get a click URL, and a neat customizable homepage. Add a blog and a photo album and there I have my own personal website.

    But, I am still unsure as to how this could be a group mailing facility. I really liked the Ajax interface and fast performance though :). Yahoo Killer or not, its definitely good stuff.
  • Nexo looks very neat. I created my own page and as a social networking site looks fine. Sign up is great, customisability is great. But (I agree with Dan's comment) where oh, where is the message archive?

    Which leads me on to why one wishes to recreate Y!G? Recently I have been taken with Grouply (http://www.grouply.com/register.php?r=203203) which is a social networking front end to YahooGroups & soon supposedly GoogleGroups.

    So if you had a cross between Nexo (all the layout, additional tools) and Grouply (full support for the best bits of Y!G along with social tagging, bookmarking and rating), now that would be something to shout about.
  • Spoon
    I'm wondering whether you actually used nexo in a community based situation. I find the fact that you cannot turn off email notifications about everything that happens on the site a giant shortfall. I think a solution would be for moderators to bee able to choose what notifications they want to be emailed to the community, if any. Otherwise the users in the community get too much email.
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