Facebook has unveiled several new features on its social network, including one that makes it easier for its 500 million members to separate online friendships into groups and another that lets them archive personal information posted on the website.
The new grouping feature is designed to share comments, photos and other links with others based on relationships and interests. For instance, you can now group Facebook friends by family, work, sports teams and college.
The tool means Facebook users will be able to pool their friends in different groups or circles and send messages to, or hold mass-chats online with, those groups. For instance, mailing an image to the group email using your phone will eventually post the photo on the group’s wall. Since the group’s visibility to everyone is disabled by default, only group members will get the notification about that photo and will be able to view it.
The much demanded Group chat feature will also be available once this new feature goes live. You can thus chat with selected group members at the same time. However, we still think that offering Chat History feature even with a week’s limit would’ve been better.
The new groups feature began rolling out Wednesday and will spread to the company’s entire user base “relatively quickly,” according to Facebook.
“We’re not being hyperbolic when we say (groups) is going to be a fundamental shift in how people use Facebook,” company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a press conference.
Zuckerberg said hundreds can be in a group, but it is ideally suited for 20 to 25 people. The function lets users leave groups.
Facebook had offered a way to create groups through a “lists” feature. But only about 5% of its members use it. “No one wants to make lists,” Zuckerberg said.
Now, “You can order your life by groups,” Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president of product, said in an interview. “We’re not building a social product but a social platform.”
Zuckerberg said the change — which analysts say is intended partly to mirror the various circles that people navigate in actual life — should make people even more comfortable publishing personal information on the service.
“If we can do this, then we can unlock a huge amount of sharing that people want to do, but today they just can’t do, because either it’s too annoying, or there just aren’t the right privacy settings to be able to do this at large scale,” Zuckerberg told reporters at his Palo Alto, California headquarters.
Its new groups feature comes a few months after a Google staffer published a white-paper identifying the inability of social networks such as Facebook to distinguish between the multiple social groups that an individual belongs to in real life.
Separately, Facebook introduced a tool for people to download digital copies of all their personal information on the site. So you can download all status updates, photos, wall posts, messages, and profile information as a backup copy. This feature would be available starting later today from Account Settings.
It also unfurled a dashboard to track games, quizzes and other applications distributed on Facebook. With the new dashboard, you will get to see which applications are using your data and also verify it. All applications authorized by you will be visible in a single view and then of course, you can make necessary changes or even remove the application.
Facebook’s announcements caught many reporters and analysts by surprise.
Buildup to the event had centered on several rumors, including a redesign of the Facebook site or a deal with Internet telephone leader Skype to mesh their communications services more closely together. Under such a potential partnership, Facebook users would be able to sign into Skype through their Facebook profile.
