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Suba Vasudevan
Shweta and Amit, two Mumbai-based students, were off to the US for a Masters programs. They had too many doubts though, and the task required a lot of networking. So, what they did was set up an online community where students like them, from all over India, could join and trade relevant information. A few months later, their community was all the rage.
Welcome to online communities/ groups/ mailing lists or a cross between all three. Among the more popular ones in India, at the moment, are the FALL2001 group and CS-FALL2001, for communities of Indian students going to the US in August 2001.
Both are interlinked and FALL2001 has a database of 1500 members!
Everything from the admission process to vaccinations required, to roommate searches and VISA information is traded freely, quickly, and daily. Best of all, almost all students know their future classmates even before setting foot on US shores.
Yahoo!Groups merged with E-Groups a while ago. What you find at Yahoo!Groups is a large number of communities for anything from Britney Spears and astronomy to lesbians, Texas residents or studying abroad.
Once you register and sign up for a particular group, you are on its mailing list. You can view messages on the group pages, read them in your inbox, post messages, reply collectively or individually, and more. On Yahoo!Groups you can also have separate pages for a database, members, polls, chat, etc. You can share photos and files, plan group events and, basically, network like never before.
Says Ajay Shah, a regular at a Yahoo!Group for Britney Spears, "It's fun discussing your favourite pop star. It's not like a regular chat site. You can just send messages and wait for replies, see what others have had to say, scan through the database, read up on members, upload files and make new friends who share your interests."
He adds: "Although such groups are really more useful if they are serious in nature, you can always just hang around if you have nothing else to do online."
A relatively new offering is Community Zero, who still have a long way to go in terms of design and services. There are other offbeat and smaller groups too, like Mountain States Genetic Network, a serious community of genetic scientists, amateurs and researchers.
Apple's website lists mailing lists and techie communities, and so does Group Sense. The latter also have their own community called SmartNet and some links to other communities for religion and even agriculture!
You have the likes of PAML, which strives to give you a regular and updated index of mailing lists from across the globe. It is a compilation of contact information for many mailing lists, searchable by list name or subject. Similarly, Liszt hosts mailing list directories only.
While many sites like Business Week's online forums are great too, they are mainly messaging areas, not dedicated to communities of like-minded people. So, if you need to get networked, why not search for a group matching your interests or, better still, start one of your own?
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