Facebook introduce the Groups feature a few weeks back as a means to share information and updates with a specific set of people.
For a feature that was supposedly meant to facilitate smaller-scale interactions with family and close friends, many users found Groups to be woefully lacking in privacy controls.
Facebook has taken a cue from the user feedback and introduced a number of new features to Groups with emphasis on more privacy for group admins.
These features fall into 4 different categories with improvement in Privacy features, better group control, addition of photo albums for group users and a brand new “Send” button.
Facebook Groups – New Features:
“In the six months since the launch, people have created over 50 million Groups on Facebook. It’s grown quickly because of its social design.
Instead of making everyone build and manage individual friend lists, one person can create a group for their families and everyone in the family gets to use it”, said Elliot Lynde on the Facebook blog.
The New Groups Features can be divided in 4 categories:
1) Questions and Polls In Facebook Groups:
You’ve always been able to post updates to Groups, but now you can post questions and polls for only members to weigh in on.
You’ll get quick responses to questions like “What movie should we see?” and “When should we should hold our next soccer practice?”
2) Photo Albums For Groups:
Facebook groups can now host entire albums. Prior to this update, users could only upload single photo to groups.
3) Approval Of New Members:
For group owners, new control has been added, that lets you approve people before they are added to your group.
Previously any member can add a new member in the Group created by you.
4) New Facebook “Send” Button:
We are quite familiar with the “Like” button we see on various websites. “Send” is basically a more targeted “Like” button that allows people to share things they find on the web with a specific group.
Starting today, the Send button will be available on over 50 leading websites, and it will appear in more places soon.
For people who were using older version of Groups, Facebook has created a tool that makes it easy to upgrade to the new Groups format. Owners and members of old Groups will be receiving information about how to upgrade within the coming weeks.
Facebook groups is a pretty handy feature which helps people share and discuss stuff with more privacy with specific groups.
What we talk with our friends or roommates isn’t always what we talk to or share with family. So just like in the real world, you can have separate space for conversation on Facebook as well.
Ready to start a new group? Visit www.facebook.com/groups.
[Via – Facebook Blog]
