Even More on Distance Ed Formats

In my ongoing journey into distance education technologies, I have enrolled in a mini-course that is being taught over the Yahoo! Groups platform.  This is an interesting choice of technology and one I haven't seriously used before.  The upside is that you can create 'inboxes' and 'outboxes' so class members can submit assignments and the instructor can return them with comments in a very user friendly way - and everyone else can see the projects and work on them too.  (There's a lot of group work in this course and Yahoo! is pretty user friendly on that front.)  The downside is that the discussion threads seem even less user-friendly than in Blackboard.  It's kind of hard to arrange them in a way where it's easy to find what you want although I can't really put my finger on why.  It may just be the formatting of the discussion threads page rather than any technical difference between how these threads and other threads work ie the page with the discussion threads just looks a little 'busy' and hard to navigate until you're used to it.  And of course using Yahoo! groups requires all class members to have a Yahoo! account.  Has anyone else used Yahoo! for teaching purposes?  I'd be interested to know what others think.