google have just acquired deja news. this seems like a good thing to me as google are much better at putting together decent user interfaces than deja. so far most of the good bits of deja’s interface seem to have gone missing, for example, the ability to skip from one search result to the next without heading back to the results page. but i think google will triumph as they’ve already added the ability to view a thread with one page download rather than having to wait for each message to download on a separate page. this is a good sign for the future of usenet. the worrying bit is that google are promising to put up all of the old usenet archives that deja have, a lot of the old stuff had vanished off deja’s site in the last couple of years. i was hoping deja had shredded all that old stuff from the days before i realised anyone was archiving. cringe.