An average Facebook user may have more than 150 Facebook friends, but they rarely want to speak with all of them at once.
While swapping messages with small groups of friends on Facebook is possible - it hasn't been easy. It required users to create custom 'friend lists' for each group you want to target - a task that less than five percent of all Facebook users leverage.
That's why Facebook introduced new capabilities this week that allow users to create personal groups, with integrated chatting, messaging, and emailing. The new groups feature is meant to make it easy to share private information among groups.
There are three types of groups: open, closed and secret. All Facebook users will be able to see an open group, including its members and content. Closed groups have a public identity, but group activities are private. Secret groups are hidden completely from non-members. Groups are intended to be small (100 or fewer members) and are penalized as they grow. For example, when a group reaches 250 members, notifications are reduced and the ability to chat is removed.
"The important groups in your life tend to be small," said Facebook CEO Mike Zuckerberg. Currently, he said that people often hesitant to share information with their friends because they're concerns about annoying - or overwhelming - too many of their friends with frequent updates they aren't interesting to everyone they know.
Facebook expects the volume of conversation to increase - along with the confidence of users, who will find it easier to talk in smaller groups.
Facebook lists aren't going away, but Facebook expects groups to become the widely-adopted norm. Other changes? a dashboard that will display a Facebook user's privacy/application settings and the ability to easily export your personal data from Facebook.
Across the Universe
Chris Cox, vice president of product at Facebook, said that Facebook groups is mean't to mimic and leverage the social relationships we have with friends. This brings to mind this scene from Across the Universe, a 2007 film featuring music from the Beatles.