For the past 6 months I've been discussing various telco/ISP companies with a friend of mine by email. The great thing about email is that it's easy. The bad thing is that the discussions tend to get trapped in our respective mailboxes and it's also interspersed with cat pictures. I thought there must be a better tool.
What we need is something that we can share links via, and then comment on said links, in private. And the resulting archive should be searchable. And it should be convenient to use -- email & web interfaces please.
I'd heard of Yammer being popular in the enterprise space and surely our basic needs would be a small subset of their epic feature list. I gave their basic account a try (it's free). The email interface seemed to fail to accept an email reply to a post, with my comment showing up 6 hours later. Maybe I caught them at a bad time but as someone who doesn't need the full enterprise suite it seems like a slightly-clumsier-but-private-Facebook. The attraction of something like Yammer is that most of their customers pay, and it's now Microsoft owned, so I have some confidence that they wouldn't disappear overnight.
Maybe I am aiming too high, we only have simple needs. Google Groups should do what we want. And it does... except the new Groups UI is so butt ugly that even as a nerd who values function over form I can't bring myself to use it. I was going to include a screenshot but I don't want to hurt your eyes. I'd go so far as to say that Yahoo! Groups looks better, ouch.
On to Facebook. I've been using it with a group of high school friends to share geeky/tech links and it works well. The email interface works well. And IMHO the Facebook UI is both functional and pretty.
The only weakness in Facebook groups is that it won't index the content of shared URLs -- this makes search a little trickier than it otherwise could be. In addition, both Facebook and Google Groups don't index keywords in URLs unless they are "-" separated. (It astounds me that in 2012 some news sites are still using "_" when "-" has been "best practice" for a decade?).
Pinboard reputedly has one of the best archiving features around but it doesn't support groups. The two of us could share a single Pinboard account but that makes discussion weird.
I've been a Diigo user for several years and I like it. Unfortunately whilst it has private group support it doesn't support discussion associated with a bookmark.
It feels a little weird that with social startups popping up every 5 seconds there's really only one workable option for what seems like a common(?) use case.
