Groups.io was founded by Mark Fletcher[0], who in '97 started the mailing list service that Yahoo! eventually bought and turned into their Groups product. They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1]. Nonetheless, they're small and one might guess there's a high bus factor here. (Sorry Mark!)
I think it's a toss up either way. I hadn't seen talk of Google Groups being internally significant until this thread, but they've burned enough similar products that it was barely a consideration for me.
> They're about 10 years in and he posts weekly changelogs and updates[1].
This isn't quite the brag you think it is.
10 years in, a product like this should be mostly fleshed out. On the linked page, I'm seeing design as well as technical changes mentioned. Also, they apparently only started working on translations recently.
Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. Once you accept that, your perspective on 10 years may change. It's a long time. I challenge anyone to find discussions of this type from 100 years ago. Even if it was recorded (unlikely), did it survive after all of the participants died (unlikely)? Yes, we have 100 year old newspapers, but 100 year old discussions about underwater knitting.
Scientific journals were basically the mailing lists of their time, especially when they first started. You can easily find journals from 100s of years ago.
I think it's a toss up either way. I hadn't seen talk of Google Groups being internally significant until this thread, but they've burned enough similar products that it was barely a consideration for me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fletcher_(businessman)
[1] https://groups.io/g/updates/topics