
Facebook Overhauls Groups, A Social Solution To Create “A Pristine Graph” - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/facebook-groups/
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amanuel
I'm not buying the idea that a social graph has long term value. Relationships
come and go. People die. People delete their Facebook accounts.

A social graph is just a digital incarnation of a yearbook. I don't recall
yearbooks being valuable or useful...perhaps on a personal sentimental level.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical.

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ctice
You're right that yearbooks are not terribly useful on a day-to-day basis
since it's static. However, I think Facebook's value comes from the organic
nature of the site. You can update and craft your social graph to how you see
yourself interacting with different groups of people at a given point in time.
Of course your social graph will morph over time -- Facebook will hopefully
make that as frictionless as possible. Facebook is a history of yearbooks.

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hrabago
It seems to me they could have supported lists better. I created a bunch of
lists and try to make sure everyone is in the correct list, but most of my FB
browsing is now through the iPhone app, which doesn't prompt me about this
stuff. It always felt like they did just enough to have a decent
implementation of it, but it never really got as integrated as it needed to
be.

If it's a feature that isn't used as often as they hoped, it's likely because
(a) their support for this feature is lacking, and (b) they haven't educated
users about this feature.

Both of these points weren't surprising to me because I always believed that
FB wants people to share as much about themselves to as many people as
possible.

I think without Google Me, and perhaps frid.ge, they would never have
reconsidered these concerns.

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Nervetattoo
Now i finally can have a social network with my real close friends again
inside facebook. Even reminds me of real social life. Does this imply facebook
is even more integrated in our lifes when we clearly define different circles
of trust?

For my uses it just lacks albums to be perfect.

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hugh3
Wait, so let me get this straight. Someone can add me to a group without my
permission, and I suddenly start getting notifications about all the crap that
goes on in that group? That sounds obnoxious even by facebook standards.

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smackfu
Think it needs to be a friend that adds you, and you can remove yourself and
they can't re-add you.

The same friend could message you to death if they wanted to.

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hugh3
True, but they'd probably realise they were being annoying. I'm concerned that
some of my less ... sophisticated friends might start adding me to every group
they think is funny.

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markkat
This is a good move on their part, as it was a big reason why people didn't
like Facebook, why I didn't like FB. I am still not getting an account, but
one obstacle has been removed.

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seiji
Did this just destroy frid.ge?

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koblas
IMHO frid.ge was always a bit questionable, I personally built a comparable
product and quickly realized that there is a huge amount of momentum around
getting people into a system that is pretty much devoid of people you know.

Groups (and Events) are two features that Facebook has left somewhat sidelined
over other feed oriented features. If they can get the mojo right on Groups
then whole classes of me-too features (like frid.ge) are somewhat suspect. The
interesting question is can you have a group that's coworkers who aren't your
Friends, thus digging into Yammer is a serious way.

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wccrawford
"He says that 95 percent of users on Facebook in tagged in a photo"

They're tagged in photos because of those stupid apps that tag a photo with a
bunch of random people from your friends list. I hated those things. I was
constantly going and untagging myself from them.

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hugh3
Really? I've never seen one of those apps.

(I'm tagged in a bunch of photos because I go places and reflect photons.)

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shrikant
It's usually apps along the lines of "Born in July!" and "Names Starting with
S" and "All Sagittarius Chicas!" and the like.

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hugh3
Odd, I've never seen those. While some of my friends (bless their hearts) are
not quite _au fait_ with the how-to-avoid-spamming-your-friends thing, I don't
think any of 'em have ever added any apps quite that annoying.

Then again, I wasn't born in July, don't have a name starting with S, and am
most definitely not a Saggitarius Chica, so maybe I'm just missing out.

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whackedspinach
Has anyone seen new API features for these new groups? I want to write a
script to pull members from old groups (already possible), and then add them
to one of these new groups. They seem more useful, but I don't want to deal
with adding 100+ people to the new group.

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smackfu
Uh, yeah, so don't play around with this because everyone you add to a group
gets notified, and it's kind of a pain to delete a group since you need to
remove each person individually.

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skbohra123
may be this is 'the facebook' killer.

