I created a new Yahoo Group last night, because I made a lot of good friends at my last job and we're quite literally flung out all over the world these days. I'd been thinking about it for the last month or so and last night I finally got around to setting it up. I sent out nearly 50 invites last night to people that I had in my address book who I used to work with, and six people have already signed up.

I'm part of a few different Yahoo Groups, they seem to work pretty well. freedivecayman is a group of, well, freedivers in Cayman. That group has been pretty quiet lately, which is weird considering that Kirk has a bunch of people down here right now for Diver Down 2005 culminating in some world-record attempts next month. They're all staying just around the corner from me at Cobalt Coast and Danny's rigged up some downlines on his boat to practice on. I think they're doing the record attempts with DiveTech and then running a few days of freediving workshops. I might go to one of them, if the time and price is right. Another one is called Canuckz and is pretty lively. It's all the characters that I used to “hang out” with in IRC back in the good/bad old days of the internet before all this WWW and GUI stuff was around.

This was my first time seeing the Yahoo Groups interface from a moderator/list-owner's point of view, and it's pretty slick. Message boards, shared photo albums and files, granular control as far as private/public/members only access, management via email or web-based, and even an XML feed for the message board.

If you used to work with me and didn't get an invite, go to the board and “sign up”. I'm hoping for a little viral spreading to people who's email addresses I didn't have in my address book (or who've changed their email address and it's bounced back). If you didn't get an email from me, you weren't snubbed, I just didn't have your address handy.