Do you Know your Facebook Groups ?

Facebook began rolling out to users a new groups feature. So what does that mean for users?

Speaking to reporters at Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the impetus for groups was to make communicating with your friends on Facebook more like talking with them in the real world.

We don’t say the same things to buddies at a bar as we do to our boss at work, or to our grandparents at Thanksgiving – so why should Facebook treat them all the same?

Facebook has previously given users some ability to target communication to specific friends by sorting them into lists. But that process wasn’t very fun, and only about 5% of users ever bothered to do it, Zuckerberg said.

The company also looked at finding some kind of algorithm to automatically sort our friends into groups based on how we tend to interact with them on Facebook. But Zuckerberg said no algorithm is perfect, and getting something like this wrong could have serious social consequences.


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In the new groups feature, anybody has the ability to make a group, and to automatically add others to it. Here’s how to do it:

You create a group by going to the groups application (on the left of your home page) and clicking “ Create a Group ” in the upper right corner of the page, or by clicking the “Create Group” link that may appear in the left column of your home page.

Groups come in three flavors:

1. Open : Members and the content of the group are public.
2. Closed : The members of the group are made public, but the content is kept private. (This is the default.)
3. Secret : Both the members and the content of the group are private.

In all cases, only members of the group can add other friends to the group, by clicking “Add Friends to Group.”

And you can appoint a group administrator to be responsible for maintaining membership rolls. The person who created the group is automatically listed as the administrator and can make other people administrators too. To do that, the administrator can click on the “Edit Group” button at the top right of the group page and then click on “Members” in the left column. Next to each member’s name is a link that says “Make Admin.”

Only your friends can add you to groups, but you do not get prior approval before being added to a group. Rather, you are notified that you have been added to the group, similar to being notified that you’ve been tagged in a photo. You can also request to join a group and can leave a group at any time by using the “Leave Group” link on the right of the group page.

Facebook hopes that the normal rules of social interaction will make groups work. That’s what would keep a group member from inviting somebody unwanted into a group – or posting something inappropriate to a group.

“If we can do this, we can unlock a huge amount of sharing that people want to do, but don’t think they can do because it is either too annoying or there aren’t the right privacy settings,” Zuckerberg said.

Once you have made or joined a group you can share status updates, photos and other Facebook content with just those people by using the links at the top of the group page. If other members of the group are online, you can participate in a live group chat group chat with them by clicking on the link in the right column of the group page. There’s also a new docs feature that lets you collaboratively work on writing a document with others, such as a class project.

For more information on the new groups, Facebook has a page for frequently asked questions, including how to ban or remove problematic group members and how to delete groups altogether.

The verdict is still out on whether groups will serve to better help Facebook users organize their social worlds online. Let us know your experiences in the comments.

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Posted By: Doc CN