OK, I have tired of having ideas that I never get around to implementing, so I am going to take a page out of Seth Godin's book and just write this thing up so somebody with more time and inclination can get rich from doing it. Or at least provide a service to people who could use it.

It's time that Google Groups (or at least some of them) were available via NNTP. Sure, I can use the somewhat quirky and always less than satisfactory web interface that Google provide. Or I could set the groups I am interested in to deliver the posts via email. But an NNTP client would just be so much more convenient and usable. So what we need is a system that scrapes Google Groups and offers NNTP access to the resulting content.

There is, of course, the minor issue of Google's terms of service. The most significant part says:

Google authorizes you to view and download a single copy of the Materials solely for your personal, non-commercial use. You may not sell or modify the Materials or reproduce, display, publicly perform, distribute, or otherwise use the Materials in any way for any public or commercial purpose without the written permission of Google. Special rules may apply to the use of certain software and other items provided via the Services, and are noted where appropriate.

If you would like information about obtaining Google's permission to use any of the Materials on your Web site, please send an e-mail to groups-support@google.com.

So we will have to persuade Google not to be evil - I imagine they will be upset not to be able to insert advertising in the stream, but if they did that wouldn't be Usenet, now would it? I would hope Google would be mindful of how they came by the archival content that started this venture in determining how to license the materials.

I know there are people in the Python world who could put this together in under a week.

While I am dealing in quirky ideas, here's another one, in this case to monitor (and hopefully control) spending on government credit cards. Could this work?

Gmail is taking a step forward this week, as Google roll out IMAP access for their mail service that offers 2.5+ GB of on-line storage per customer. It may be a while before it's available to all users.

This makes it possible to use Gmail from a range of different devices and see the synchronized contents of your Gmail mailbox from them all. Well done Google, people have been after this for years.