Yahoo Introduces New "Groups" Format

Recently, Yahoo Groups completed a major overhaul of the way their system looks and works.

This is relevant to members of the Boston & New England HSP Group since our online discussion group is hosted on Yahoo Groups.

The main impact this has for group members is the need to "learn a new system." After using the new group interface (as the group admin) for a couple of weeks, I'm not that impressed. Part of what is bothersome is that the new setup looks absolutely nothing like the old one. Aside from the fact that we got to keep our archive of messages, everything has changed. And whereas the new YahooGroups "looks more modern" it's really not very intuitive, and it's difficult to figure out where things are.

Perhaps the change will not affect new members (who will never have seen the "old" system) as much as existing members who now need to learn their way around a completely new web site.

We have considered taking the group completely OFF Yahoo and perhaps moving to Facebook instead. Lots of people already have Facebook accounts, and even though Facebook's group functionality is not that great, it's pretty easy to use. The downside is that a lot of people-- and especially HSPs-- really do not like social media sites, and especially Facebook. There are also "privacy issues," as facebook (even though the service is free) uses people's personal information for marketing.

For the moment, we're going to take a "wait and see" approach with Yahoo... see how group activity and membership is affected by the change. The HSP Boston group has never been particularly active or lively (we rarely have more than 25 messages in a month), so any effects may be minimal.

As HSPs, we generally don't like change. And even when we "like" change, we can still find it disturbing and overstimulating. So, for now, we'll just wait and see how this "change" impacts the group.