At a press conference in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg and his product management team unveiled new features to roll out later today. Most significantly, Facebook is launching a new Groups tool. As Zuckerberg explained in a recent blog post: “Rather than asking all of you to classify how you know all of your friends, or programming machines to guess which sets of people are likely cohorts, we’re offering something that’s as simple as inviting your best friends over for dinner. And we think it will change the way you use Facebook and the web.”
You can create Groups for your family, say, or your co-workers or your poker buddies. Creating a Group lets you selectively share information with a small group, such as messages. It works somewhat like Friends List, which didn’t garner great attention on Facebook, Zuckerberg admitted at the press conference. “Around 5 percent of users were making lists, and often only just one list,” he said.
He believes the new Groups feature will go viral because “it’s not about one person doing something themselves or a machine doing it, but making it so 500 million people can each share with each other and that sum total can lead to a greater map of understanding the world.” Also, because Events is one of the most popular tools on Facebook, Zuckerberg added, creating Events through Groups will be even more intuitive.
You can also “group chat” with people in your select groups, as a neater way to organize who you want to chat with, Zuckerberg says. All members of a group can interact through a group chat, regardless of whether they are confirmed friends, the FAQ section for Groups notes.
Justin Shaffer, Groups’ product manager, said at the event, “Most importantly, sharing within groups gives you control over the distribution of your messages.” He stressed only members can add friends to a Group, and Zuckerbeg said they are rolling this feature out to individuals, and not corporations…yet. “This is the first iteration of this feature, we just wanted to get it out there,” he said.
Another tool available soon is the Download Your Information product. Zuckerberg summed it up in a blog post: “We’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information.”
Want all your Facebook content on your hard drive? Click this feature and wait until Facebook downloads all that data into one big zip file. You’ll receive an email once the zip file is ready. Facebook made sure to address security concerns: “To protect your information, this feature is only available after confirming your password and answering appropriate security questions.”
Zuckerberg said, “Stuff that you put into the site, you should be able to take out.”
Finally, the final new release is a dashboard for you to view all the data apps have collected. In one place you can see all the permissions and info apps have on you, breaking it down by app. Download Your Information can be viewed via Account Settings.
If you accessed TripAdvisor, for instance, expand the view to see that this app can access photos and videos and has the ability to send you an email. You can revoke the ability for an app to send you an email, for instance.
This tool is also helpful to keep track of what apps you use, even if you haven’t accessed them in months.
The blog post states: “You can change the settings for an application to make less information available to it, or you can even remove it completely.”
Zuckerberg and his Facebook team want to address any security or privacy concerns users may be concerned about, stressing in his blog post: “We hope these tools bring you more confidence as you share things on Facebook, and that your experience grows richer and more real as a result.”
