Last week Facebook held a big press event to unveil the new Groups feature.
Of course, if you're a user of Facebook, you know that there Groups have existed - for quite some time. So what's the difference now? Tagging.
Facebook maintains that a large amount of photos are tagged not by the individual, but by someone else. (This makes sense, as most people tend to tag everyone else in the photo when they post an album.) Facebook also takes this to mean that people would then also like the option to tag others when it comes to groups. And by tag, we mean automatically make them a member of a group without their consent. There's actually some good logic behind this, but also some concerns.
First off, Facebook says this is an alternative to the "Lists" feature that it has long tried to promote to users with little success. Lists were meant to help you sort your Facebook friends into different categories - friends, family, coworkers, etc. Unfortunately for Facebook, lists have been massively unpopular. Only 5 percent of users have any lists. To combat this, Facebook has created the new Groups, wherein people can add different friends to particular groups.
This has some good applications:
1) You got together with your old college buddies and the night quickly turned frat party. You don't want grandma seeing all of those party pictures, so now, instead of just generally posting them to your profile, you can instead post the pictures directly to your group of college buddies. The content can be closed to just the group members, so there's no risk of forever damaging your perfect image in grandma's eyes.
2) Clubs and teams have a great spot for getting all of their info together. Post schedules, team photos, information about the next event, etc - all into the group. Unlike before where you had to invite people to join the group and you were at the mercy of begging that lone holdout to click "Accept" and get into the group, now when you tag them, they're automatically members of the group. Of course, they can opt out at any time, but it may help you coordinate your club more easily. In addition, the default settings of these new groups include notifications. If you didn't remember to check an old group's page, you might never know there was new information. With the new groups, you receive a notification in your e-mail and on your news feed whenever anything new is published (which can be both a positive or negative thing, but like we said, you do have the option to change those settings).
But, this also has some bad applications:
1) How useful is this in real life? Beyond certain clubs and teams, there are few applications where this really works truly well. For example, having a "Friends" group may be useful to you, but not to your friends. If you create one group of friends that combines your college buddies, cool co-workers, and nice neighbors, they all become one big group that is notified whenever anyone posts anything. While this might be good for you since you know and like everyone in the group, your coworker couldn't care less that your college buddy is reminiscing about some amazing party. It's difficult to create a personal group (outside of clubs and teams) where everyone knows everyone else and cares what they all have to say. It will either become a huge amount of spam, or else fractured into tons of tiny groups - College Friends, High School Friends, Work Friends, Block Party Neighbors, etc - where it could seemingly get really repetitive and difficult to deal with.
2) It can be abused - as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington and Facebook's own Mark Zuckerberg found when they were each unwittingly added to Facebook's NAMBLA group. For once, however, we actually think Facebook did OK with this privacy-wise, even considering the potential for abuse because A) if a "friend" of yours is tagging you to join NAMBLA, they probably shouldn't be your friend anwyay, and B) it seems that if you tag someone for a group and they quit it, you are blocked from adding them to any more groups, which is actually a pretty nice feature.
It's an interesting move by Facebook, but we're not sure it holds a lot of promise -- now a week after they first announced it, we have yet to see it used (or even discussed) by anyone outside of the tech realm.
Have you tried the new groups? Great idea or the next big flop? Let us know in the comments below.
I definitely think that for certain users, this feature holds a lot of promise. As you said, clubs, teams, and other organizations can easily create a group to share updates, messages, and other information with all their members. It might not work for a big group of friends, but I would consider using this feature for a smaller group of friends, like my old roommates from college. We don't all live in the same city anymore, and we try to all keep in contact as much as possible usually via e-mail. This would be a great way to share recent updates and news with each other.
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