 features Wednesday, calling them the answer to the big problem of wanting to only share information with a small set of friends. The site also gave users the ability to export all their data and keep a closer eye on the sites and apps that they have allowed to access the profile.
One of the difficult problems of online sharing is figuring out how to share selectively. In e-mail, it’s intuitive — type only the names of the people you want to send photos of your vacation to, and then hit Send. With Facebook, the default choices have always been much less selective — basically a choice between friends or the entire world. There is the option to create a specific list, but it’s cumbersome, and few people bother — instead choosing either to not share or to overshare.
Which is to say, as founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Wednesday, the current controls on Facebook aren’t good enough.
"You want to interact in different groups and share different things with different sets of people,” Zuckerberg said. "We have made it pretty easy to share with everyone or just your friends, but for many people, just your friends isn’t private.
Figuring it out who to send a message to using algorithms turns out to not work, Zuckerberg said, so the answer Facebook came up with is typically Facebook: letting users make choices and then make them public.
The solution called "Groups” is to let users create list of friends, but the lists are now public. Each of those groups has a shared online space with group chat and e-mail lists. The idea is to make friend lists "viral” and to take the kinds of conversations now on e-mail, e-mail lists and bulletin boards and eventually migrate them from the general internet onto Facebook. Each group gets its own e-mail address such as thesmithfamily@facebook.com, which will go out on a first-come, first-served basis.
Posts from the group will show up on your wall and in usual Facebook notifications, but the wall will only show the ones from groups you frequently use — an extension of the current algorithm that prioritizes updates from close friends over those from an old high school friend you don’t interact with much.
Groups can either be open to the world, readable only by the group, or even secret — so that it’s existence can’t be discovered by nonmembers, which will be particularly useful for high school cliques. Any user of a group can add another member, and all current members are notified of the new member.
Groups are best, according to Facebook, when they stay small, up to 100 people, though they have no built-in limit.
While groups solve a problem that users have long complained about, the set-up — with group chat, a shared message board and a built-in e-mail list — also makes it clear that Facebook thinks it can colonize other social outposts on the net, such as Yahoo groups, traditional e-mail lists and bulletin boards.
The groups feature is clearly an attempt to pull those conversations off the greater web and into Facebook’s growing communication empire.
Facebook also announced that it is no longer a one-way valve — where photos, videos and post flow in but there’s no way out.
Facebook users will be able to export all their data, including videos and photos. Facebook will zip up this info into a downloadable file, which you can then open up as a page in your browser.
Finally, Facebook also introduced an app dashboard that lets users see which apps and third-party sites they have allowed to access their profiles and with what permissions. Using the dashboard, users can revoke permissions and see when an app last accessed your data.
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