Our project at work enabled a community of 1000+ folks to communicate via a closed google group to chat with us about desired software features, any issues, local extensions or patches, etc. It’s this really neat collaboration area that my team of just a few folks spends quite a bit of effort in their care and feeding. Google groups in some ways makes that somewhat hard. Let me put that differently: there are a few things it could do as a core product that would make things much easier, and there are even some extensions/mashups I’d like to make to help me satisfy some local use scenarios.

First stop: google help forums… Can google groups let me identify unanswered messages in some way, or topics over the last x period of time with the most varied set of respondents? answer: uh, those forums aren’t really active anymore, and no mention seen of such features. Next step: any REST APIs to help me put together a solution? Uh, nope there, too.. Feature request out there for such… Lots of comments of ‘I need that, too!”, but no responses from google.

I did trip across mention of ATOM and RSS feeds. Hopefully, those plus some cloud storage of additional metadata may get me to a solution. Aiming for the following: discovery of unanswered messages, discovery of outlier topics (revisited after long time or large number of responses or…), moderator tagging of topics to flag for team, maybe end user tag clouds sorts of stuff…. Lots of ideas, and then the idea of further integrating with some sort of crm kind of system also appeals. (Nope, not proposing writing a crm here. But integrating with one would be useful. Wonder if crms take email feeds or rss or atom feeds to auto handle much of what I just described? Hmmmm….)