The list below - courtesy of Elizabeth - summarizes some ten of the major differences between YG and GG, so that you can make some determination about their relative ease of use, features, and effectiveness. EVO has traditionally used YG and it seems to work best for the types of needs the EVO sessions generally have.  However, this year, there has been some interest in trying out GG, hence this list.  Enjoy!  If you have more points to add, feel free to edit this page and contribute your 2 cents. There is also a table in case you prefer to add your data that way.  -- Laine

1) In Google you can have members self-enroll or you can invite members. Totally free self-enrollment invites bots and spammers. Inviting members means you have to receive an email request individually and then go to the Google site and add the new member yourself--and respond to requests quickly. (Remember, you are looking at 50-100 requests in the first 2 weeks.) In Yahoo, you approve members who attempt to self-join, but you can approve a whole batch of requests daily from one place without clogging your email box. You can ensure that potential members write you something to indicate they are human. So in YG we can quickly find spammers and boot them out and they can't rejoin immediately, as they could with Google groups.

2) You can send out an automated welcome message when people join that can be fairly complex (not just 250 characters). This could include the syllabus and PWs and site links for our wiki. In GG you'd have to send out repeated emails, or post that info on a page that might lead to potential spam of our other linked sites.

3) In YG, we also can trace "bounced" emails and help participants with their mail settings. I don't see those features in Google, which is more open-ended and delivers mail, I think, as individual messages (anyone know for sure on this?). That could wind up flooding some mailboxes. Participants would probably have to go to the Website to view mail, which we haven't found to work particularly well for a vibrant conversation in a short time period.

4) With 50-100 participants, you will find some difficulties with email happen inevitably. If you use Google groups, the EVO Coordinators can't necessarily help you with this.

5) Google groups is organized, like Moodle, into forums or discussions, each separate from the others. Any participant can start a new, separate discussion thread or sub-group. Over the years in EVO we have found that having one uniform elist, as in YG, is far better for building community and cross-seeding discussion in the short space of our sessions. In 6 weeks there isn't much time to split off into separate discussions, but Yahoo messages can be "threaded," in effect, by searching for a topic or key words.

6) When you look at the frontpage of a GG, it gives you a list of discussions, pages, and members, and files (to downloaded). This is not as welcoming and informative as the YG frontpage. (I'm still experimenting with ways to change the default front page.)

7) Nowadays in EVO we use the YG mainly for our elists, while the wiki is for other stuff.  Google groups has the  wiki-like "create a page" function, which could be used to store links to resources and tools. So we might want to put the stuff we have already developed in our wiki into GG. However, the real wikis are now allowing some pages to be locked so that only moderators can change them. I don't know if GG has reached that point yet. We moderators can organize the pages and other stuff in the ways we have used over the last several years. Thus we have a page for introductions, a page for resources, a page for participants' work, etc. While the wiki function in GG seems fairly similar, remember that we've put a lot of time into building the wiki we already have.

8) Another reason we used YG in the past is that the Yahoo ID is the same as for Messenger, which we use as a back channel for chats, so this means the participants need only one ID to remember. Of course we now use many different venues.

Here is a link to find out more about GG - courtesy of Ryan- Google Groups Tour