October 15 – Facebook has rapidly been adding and altering features over the last few months (such as updating privacy settings and as well as the photos interface), and each change has been met with a variety of supporters and naysayers. Recently, Facebook launched its new private “Facebook Groups” feature allowing users to create intimate conversation groups with their family and friends. This move has been seen by many as a way to compete with the ability to have rapid conversations on Twitter, who already allows users to create and share custom “lists” of people regardless of whether or not the user is following the person.
Bloggers like CNET’s Caroline McCarthy – also a self-proclaimed application developer – feel Facebook’s rapid evolution is moving too fast and includes a high risk of pushing out sloppy updates that just lead to more end user problems. The biggest complaint from developers is that Facebook is creating “vestigial limbs” by adding this new Facebook Groups feature and not removing the old groups feature. They feel this poses a problem in terms of the efficiency of managing groups and applications and ultimately affects user experience.
Other naysayers are worried that this new Facebook Groups’ feature allows people to create groups, and add members without their permission creating potential privacy issues for people that may not want to be associated with a certain Facebook Group. This aspect of the new Facebook Groups does concern me. Just like being added on to random spam e-mail lists or cold-calling lists, do we really want to be added to more groups that we may not otherwise have joined?
On the flip side, several prominent bloggers, like Robert Scoble of Scobleizer and Liz Gannes of GigaOm, welcomed the updates. In a recent post, Scoble noted that he’d already built a half-dozen Facebook Groups including ones for his favorite entrepreneurs, executives, journalists, pundits and companies. He notes that the new feature is “Twitter lists done right.” Namely, Scoble enjoys that Facebook Groups do not have a cap on the number of members, unlike Twitter which limits people to 20 lists with no more than 500 people on each, and he doesn’t need to remove someone to add a new face.
Similarly, GigaOm’s Liz Gannes compared the new Facebook Groups to Yahoo!’s groups feature. Like Yahoo!, “Facebook Groups allows users to create groups that are managed by all members, hold group chats, edit a wiki, and send emails to the group.” Facebook Groups are also automatically defaulted to private, but the group manager can choose to make them “open” or “secret.”
In terms of how businesses may use this feature, I see it as an opportunity to expand conversations about brands and act as a focus group of sorts. However, I still believe that users should be able to opt in, rather than the company (or individual) guessing what group a person wants to join, and making that decision for them.
Have you created any Facebook Groups yet? I’d love to hear thoughts from marketers who plan to utilize this feature in order to forge deeper connections with consumers.