With the announcement yesterday of the beta version of Google Groups 2, Yahoo Groups now has serious competition. I’m not a disinterested party in this latest Yahoo vs Google battle. I started ONElist, which morphed into eGroups, which was acquired by Yahoo and is now Yahoo Groups. That was in September of 2000. I know and appreciate the power and utility of mailing lists. I am also friends with the people running both services, and without exception they are great engineers.

Congratulations to Dave, Brandon, Gaku and the rest of the team for launching the beta version of Google Groups 2. I’ve only played with it for a little bit but it looks good so far. Now here’s one of the really interesting things. The new groups is an intersection of USENET and mailing lists, and every group has two Atom feeds, one for topic summaries and the other for message summaries.

A few miscellaneous things: We rolled out enclosure support in Boglines today. Reaction to the release of the Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit yesterday has been fantastic. I’m not surprised, it’s a super cool piece of code. Bloglines will have some downtime late Friday night. We’ve run out of space in our current location at the co-lo, so we need to move. The Internet Archive is building a Petabox or 1,000 terabyte storage system.

This morning, we announced the Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit. I’ve been playing with a development version of this for the past couple of weeks, and I think it’s fantastic. The toolkit extends Mozilla, embedding a Bloglines notifier into it, and adding several features to the right-click menu. Some of the things it makes easy to do: Find references for the page you’re viewing Find references to a link within the page you’re viewing Search for a term by just highlighting it Subscribe to the page you’re viewing (like the easy subscribe bookmarklet) It really makes Mozilla even more useful.

Two things you need to worry about when running a server cluster are power and heat. Machines today may be small, but they put out a lot of heat and they suck up a lot of power. Many colocation centers (places where you keep your servers), weren’t designed for handling a lot of small servers that generate a lot of heat. This means, for example, that with Bloglines we can’t completely fill an entire rack at the colocation center with thin servers.