Facebook groups, response

Facebook has unveiled a new Groups feature, which enables users of the social networking site to organise their circle of friends in to groups according to likes and interests. But what do industry insiders think of this new initiative?

Boston University Quad Blog: “Zuckerberg’s main assumption, that the biggest challenge in social networking is communicating in small groups, is correct ... Unfortunately, I think Facebook has made two fundamental mistakes in how they’ve chosen to solve it. First, in his talk announcing the feature, Zuckerberg called this a natural “social solution” to the problem of sharing information in groups, because a small subset of people will build groups for everyone (the way it’s worked for tagging photos). Unfortunately, this very feature that makes photo tagging work makes groups useless, because the definition of a group is that it is exclusive ... Secondly, public groups don’t work in the current social context. Why? Because we all have different interests that go beyond the scope of our Facebook friends. Being invited to a public group about computers, let’s say, by another friend who likes computers is great. Now what? I can discuss computers with a bunch of strangers, but I’m not going to friend any of them, because the point of Facebook (and especially these new groups) is precisely not to proliferate your connections beyond your ability to keep up with them ... New public groups are going to be not just useless like they were before, but now also highly irritating for the reasons outlined above.”
Silicon Republic: “[Facebook Groups] will certainly be useful at filtering out the general noise that comes with social networks ... The key message here is context. After all, unlike the mad hoi-poloi that can be places like Twitter, this returns context to the original framework that is Facebook. You may have 300 or 600 friends, but who are the ones who really know you or fit into specific relationships based on politics, hobbies or career? Context, in my opinion, was the glue that made Facebook stickier than Twitter.”
Cnet: “Facebook Groups are about to be the bane of junior high school guidance counsellors everywhere: ‘SHE DEGROUPED ME!’”
Forbes: “The company is attempting to address a fundamental problem to its service: the lack of ability to share information and content with only a subset of one’s entire friend list. But the new Groups misses the mark ... the problem with the new Groups is lack of incentives. Tagging people in photos is one thing. Tagging people in groups and then expecting accurate and agreed-upon groupings to arise naturally is an infinitely more tricky thing. Groups in real life aren’t easily defined, and are dynamic, slippery things. Even something seemingly as simple as a family group raises many issues. Who is considered family? The nuclear family? Extended family? God-parents and second cousins? Who gets to make these final decisions within a group? Asking group users to explicitly name these groupings on an online social network in black and white could easily lead to conflict and disagreements.”