Today’s announcement of a modified Groups feature brought out my latent mathiness (the concept of recursion/fractals) with this thought – that Facebook is now opening up…a Facebook.
From my understanding of Groups, it will be a closed social network that you can invite subgroups of your friends to, kind of what Facebook was like in the beginning. Great and hopefully useful feature.
However, some points:
1) It’s a nice feature because then you can create subject specific groups. In my case, it would probably be Family, Library Dorks, Grad School, Work
2) If your goal is to communicate to specific groups, then yay. If your goal is to exclude people, then boo. If you have to exclude people, why did you add them in the first place?
The Mashable article makes the point that I wanted to make – why is there a need to cloister ourselves inside Facebook? It’s probably because we have added people we don’t want to interact with and now, through a lack of regulated social media etiquette, we don’t know what to do about them. Do we delete them? Do we block them? Do we hide them? Will they know?
“It’s probably because we have added people we don’t want to interact with and now, through a lack of regulated social media etiquette, we don’t know what to do about them.”
-my feelings exactly. I have a feeling I won’t use Groups at all. At this point, it’s just too much work to organize all these ‘friends’ whereas I’m used to using space and time to organize them in the real world. Plus its easier. Maybe if they had this feature from the get-go it would make more sense. You know what your comment reminds me of? The hoarding mentality that digital storage gives us. I have so many gigs of god-knows-what and its much too trobulesome to get in there and figure out what to do with all those files, or what files I even have.
Perhaps an app that tells you which people are likely to be in groups? Yup, depending on even more programming to organize all this… stuff!