ABBA On The Web – September 2005

In previous editions of ABBA On The Web we’ve visited some of the best ABBA websites, full of information, pictures and music. But that’s not all that the internet has to offer to ABBA fans. There are a myriad of ways that ABBA fans can interact, on mailing lists and bulletin boards and in newsgroups and forums.

There are quite literally hundreds of places where ABBA fans can gather to share news, information and reminiscences about ABBA, or talk about themselves as fans. Due to the diverse nature of ABBA fans, not all online services cater to every taste and not every forum meets the needs of every fan. In this edition of ABBA On The Web, we’ll take a quick look at some of the more popular and active forums.

Most are on free services such as Yahoo! Groups (groups.yahoo.com), MSN groups (groups.msn.com) and Google Groups (groups.google.com). Search for ABBA on these sites and you’ll get dozens of results, most of which are ABBA specific, some that are general 70s discussion groups and others that are completely unrelated to ABBA the pop group.

Yahoo! Groups can be assessed either via the web or through email messages posted to and received by members of the group, with MSN and Google Groups working only as online forums. Both Yahoo! and MSN groups allow a number of other features for members, including facilities to add links, upload images and other files. Google Groups also gives access to other forums, such as newsgroups. (More about those later.) However, with this massive oversupply most of these groups have just a few members, with little or no activity.

Mailing lists are one of the simplest and most popular forms of fan communication. Members "post" emails that are sent out to each member. There are a number of active mailing lists, the oldest being the ABBA List (groups.yahoo.com/group/abba-list/) from 1993 that moved to Yahoo! Groups a few years ago. It is still active after all these years. The busiest is ABBAMAIL (www.abbamail.com), which went online in 1997. Many members have formed friendships and have regular face-to-face meetings around the world.

Newsgroups are another form of internet communication from early on. There are two main ABBA newsgroups: alt.music.abba, for sharing information, and alt.binaries.pictures.abba, where members can share images and music files. Both have intermittent activity, with weeks of nothing followed by weeks of high activity.

Bulletin boards and forums offer another popular form of communication. The official ABBA site (www.abbasite.com) has the most active forum, but ABBAMAIL and ABBA Features (www.blackberrystudios.co.uk/abbaforum2/) also have active forums. Popular music sites such as Rolling Stone (www.rollingstone.com) and VH1 (www.vh1.com) have ABBA forums, though these are generally inactive with a few posts from people who seem to be rediscovering ABBA.

Another way of communicating is in chat rooms, where fans can chat online in real time, like a typed conversation, as opposed to waiting for email responses and bulletin board posts. Popularity of chat rooms comes and goes and, at the moment, there are no particularly active ABBA chat rooms.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to online communication between ABBA fans. There are dozens, even hundreds, of other gathering places for fans to visit. Check out ABBA World for links to them all.

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