yahoo groups-

[tali122]

whats the difference between yahoo groups- and becoming a member of a website such as this or even creating your own website?

[Gatsoman]

No difference, except that Yahoo Groups is very well known and thus has loads of people that use it and hence a lot of answers to be found.

Today is the first time I had come across this site - and I bet there are millions out there that don't know it exists.

Your own site would be even less known, unless you had the time and money and bandwidth to promote it.

[Mobius1]

Yahoo Groups and MSN Groups offer users pre-designed templates for sharing messages (similar to a forum) but also storage space for archiving and sharing photos and files, such as music and videos.

Creating your own website you can do the same thing, but you have to get everything hosted yourself and either design and build the website or use a pre-existing template. A group sets up all of this for the creator and allows a certain amount of storage space as well.

The benefit of having members in these groups is that they're all contained on a central database and their information is shared throughout the entire network of all the groups, so communication between individual members is far easier and more convenient than trying to communicate to somebody you don't know having visited your website.