I think its a bloody good idea. Just joined. But wondering if google groups was a good choice. I'm finding it quite slow, probably transient, hoping it will pass.

Hacker News India is about creating a space where Startups from India can meet other people trying to bootstrap their startup.

1. Discuss issues local to Indian startups.

2. Orgainise in person meetups of HN readers in India.

We are more technology and hacker focussed than other startup group.

Bad choice to go with Google groups:

"Google Groups will no longer be supporting the Pages and Files features. Starting January 13, you won't be able to upload new content, but you will still be able to view and download existing content. See this announcement for more information and other options for storing your content."

True, but only the Pages and files feature discussions are not going anywhere, and its the low effort way to get a discussion forum and mailing list setup.

IMO, issue 1 should be dealt with over here. Always a good idea to gain perspectives on people from other countries.

Issue 2 can probably be dealt with better on meetup.com. However, I'd personally rather see it here.

please stop creating such groups. What do you want to do that can not be done at HN ?

Focus. I don't think the discussion of Fund Raising in Bangalore would be interesting to all HN users, but I think it will be interesting to people from India, so I would like to have such a focussed group.

Also there are many Focussed groups of HN users on Google group.

http://www.google.co.in/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...

Can you point me to atleast one "active" group out there ? http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker-news, check out the post frequency, member size etc.

The use cases you mention are very few and can be easily addressed with HN tags. Example : "HN India : Fundraising event in Bangalore ?" or "HN India : Let's have a meetup in Mumbai." If it's interesting to indian HNers they will upvote it and follow it up.

Realize, that starting a group is easy, building a tribe around it is not. There are many things that made people come to HN, Paul Graham, Ycombinator, Startup School, a custom and simple software. Good content came later.

you created a group another day, posted link on a US-centered website, and expecting Indians to join.

1. India is second largest visitor to HN after US. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com . (Alexa might not be great, but its the best source I can find right now.)

2. There is no group focusing on HN readers from India, so why shouldn't I do it. (And hope people will join.)