Palo Alto, Calif. – At an event Wednesday at the company’s
headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg
unveiled a revamped Groups feature, which will allow members to share content,
emails and chat sessions with other group members. "Rather than asking all
of you to classify how you know all of your friends, or programming machines to
guess which sets of people are likely cohorts, we’re offering something that’s
as simple as inviting your best friends over for dinner. And we think it will
change the way you use Facebook and the web," Zuckerberg wrote in a blog
post announcing the revamped Groups.
Zuckerberg acknowledged at the event that very few
users are taking advantage of the site’s ability to separate friends into
different Lists, according to privacy settings, so that posts intended for
close friends, for example, aren’t seen by an employer or business contacts.
In
its user guide for the new Groups feature, Facebook gives examples of creating
groups to "share baby photos with close family; create shared docs for a
class project; [or] chat with all the members of your band at once."
Other
announcements at the event included "Download Your Information," a new
feature that lets users download all of the photos, videos, events and Wall
posts made to Facebook in a single compressed .zip file.
The company also
created a new dashboard that lets users see all of the various privacy
permissions given to the applications they are using, and make changes or
revoke them all in one place.
The dashboard also includes an access log, which
displays which apps have accessed data from your profile.
"We’ve heard
loud and clear that you want more control over what you share on Facebook — to
manage exactly who sees it and to understand exactly where it goes," added
Zuckerberg.
"With this new Groups experience and the other tools we’re
rolling out today, we’re taking a few important steps forward towards giving
you precise controls."
Related Links:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=434691727130
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20018639-248.html
http://www.facebook.com/groups
Not the change that I expect. Facebook power users use the service as a entertainment platform and that’s just it. The facebook groups and the profile download is not that awesome to me. It’s kinda lacking in a way that their meta communities are limited on what they can do. They should empower their search functionalities so groups of some sort have outstanding presence