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Saturday, October 9, 2010 (SF Chronicle)
Facebook Groups: more control, or hit at Google?
<a class="email fn" href="mailto:bevangelista@sfchronicle.com">Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer</a>
Most Facebook members seemed to be content having one big circle of
friends, with photos, status updates, news items and other "likes" visible
to anyone inside the circle whether they cared or not.
But Facebook, which never seems to be content with leaving well enough
alone, now wants to push its more than 500 million members into dividing
their big circles into smaller circles based on why they are connected
with each friend in the first place.
With Groups, the new feature that Facebook began rolling out this week,
family members won't be inundated with status updates on topics that only
co-workers would understand.
Or a Facebook member can group high school buddies to openly discuss
topics that would shock his or her church friends.
With Groups, Facebook is hoping to solve what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called
"the biggest problem in social networking," finding a way to replicate
online how people organize themselves socially in the real world.
"No one has just one single group of friends who are all alike and
homogeneous," said analyst Ray Valdes of Gartner Research. "We all have
multiple independent sets of friends. But you don't necessarily want them
to all co-mingle."
There have already been complaints that Groups can unleash a deluge of
e-mail notifications and potentially opens the way for more spam. And
critics note that friends can easily add to a group a user who may not
want to join.
Tech blogger and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, for example, complained
directly to Zuckerberg in an e-mail, saying he was "force-joined" without
his consent to a group named "NAMBLA," which apparently had nothing to do
with a controversial organization of the same name. Zuckerberg was also
added to the group.
The company, however, says that members can only be added to a group by a
recognized friend. The member can choose to leave the group, which blocks
them from being reinstated unless they request it. Chance for control
And Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, said in a blog post that, if widely adopted, Groups "goes a
long way to providing users even more control over their contextual
privacy."
"To get the most out of social networking without unduly sacrificing
privacy, it is critical that users be able to easily share information
with subsets of one's Facebook friends," he said.
Why is Facebook Inc. adding Groups, one of several upgrades introduced in
recent weeks? Valdes said Facebook wants to take pre-emptive strikes
against potential competition, especially Google Inc.
"Using a sports metaphor, it's both offense and defense," Valdes said.
"It's offense in that it really moves the ball forward in terms of
fleshing out the overall Facebook experience. It's defense in that it's a
blocking maneuver from this potential threat from Google or any other
company that wants to be a major player in the social sector, whether it's
Yahoo or Microsoft or Twitter."
Valdes noted that three months ago, Google researcher Paul Adams published
an online slide presentation that highlighted how Facebook's big social
circle design did not reflect how people organize themselves in real life.
Adams illustrated the point with a San Diego woman who teaches swimming to
children, yet loved to comment about friends who posted about their wild
nights in a Los Angeles bar. 'Lockdown' strategy
Not so coincidentally, Valdes said, Zuckerberg soon had his engineers
hunkered down in a 60-day "lockdown," working long hours seven days a week
in Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters to find solutions to problems. Groups
is one of the innovations that came out of that lockdown.
During a news conference, Zuckerberg stressed that others have tried
solving this problem with computer algorithms, a veiled reference to
Google's much-derided Buzz social-networking service.
Instead, Groups uses what Valdes calls a "friend-sourcing" model, getting
Facebook members to do the work of deciding which groups to form and who
should be included.
Facebook has long let members organize friends by different lists, such as
co-workers and families. But only 5 percent - which still equals more than
25 million people - took the time to create lists.
"It felt too much like work," Valdes said.
By default, Groups are "closed," which means only those already admitted
can view the content and discussions, although the subject and membership
list is public. Groups can also be set to "open," where the content is
public, and "secret," which keeps the membership list and content blocked
from public view. Group chats
Within a group, members can post discussion topics and initiate a live
group chat. They can also create a special group e-mail address and edit
shared documents.
Zuckerberg said that even if a small percentage of members go to the
trouble of forming a group, the idea will spread virally as members invite
others to participate, eventually spreading to cover about 80 percent of
Facebook members.
Indeed, membership in a group of noted tech reporters and bloggers that
formed even before the news conference ended grew overnight to more than
100.
Michael Murdock, who heads a website consulting firm in Arizona,
complained that Facebook needs to make it easier for members to avoid
getting deluged by notifications.
"What Facebook should do is group the group who created this nightmare and
toss them into the parking lot and make them 'dance for their lives,' "
Murdock said in an e-mail to The Chronicle.
"What they fail yet again to tell people is that when you sign up for this
or get added to a group that you will be barraged with e-mails for every
action that takes place from that signup."
Facebook does allow each person in a group to set which types of
notifications he or she will receive, if any.
The site introduced two other features the same day:
-- Download: Members will be able to download a copy of their Facebook
profiles into a compressed file. This includes friends lists, any photos
albums or video uploaded to the site, inbox messages and notes.
The feature could be used, for example, to retrieve photos in the event of
a home computer failure. Or it could be used to archive information or
move to a new social-networking site.
-- Applications Settings Dashboard: Starting next week, the company will
roll out a tool that shows what kind of information from a member's
profile have been accessed by third-party applications like games or
websites. The dashboard is supposed to make it easier to edit permissions
granted to the applications or delete them altogether.
E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2010 SF Chronicle
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