Facebook Groups: Are You In?

Just when we all thought Facebook was ruining everything, the social media network launches a new version of Groups – and it is actually good for things more than simply clogging our invites inbox and cluttering our profile pages (do I really feel more connected to anyone by joining ‘All the Lee’s of the World’?!). Facebook Groups is another amazing reason to remain an active social media-holic while somehow still getting work done:

By Ashley Lee

Friend organization and productivity. Different from the older version of Groups, this new feature lets us categorize our friends for the purpose of mass messaging, photo and event sharing, and custom privacy settings (similar to the Friend Lists) Yet those days of Facebook were so unproductive – now, groups can edit documents together. This is good news for those inevitable collaboration projects in class since the slackers can no longer get by with the excuse, “I didn’t get that email…”

Group news feed and notifications. Because your default news feed is already flooded with drunk status updates and virtual PDA between a pair of high school sweethearts, Groups has a separate feed fit for members only. This allows people to post content relevant to the group in place where people will actually read it, and notification preferences can be set so that your iPhones aren’t constantly lighting up mid-lecture when your friends are all online.

Group chat. Mark Zuckerberg, God of the virtual world, thank you for answering our prayers. I am so excited to productively procrastinate with multiple people at one time (up to 250 simultaneously), from groups of study buddies across a quiet library to cliques from my middle school days now spread all across the country.

One crazy loophole in Groups to add to Facebook’s already intrusive privacy settings: when a friend invites you into a group, you are automatically in. No more overloads of dormant group invites, each vying for campus campaign votes or mass support for some student organization or another, but that does mean you must actively unsubscribe from the group if you feel a friend wrongly invited you. And once you do, that friend can never invite you to a group again. It isn’t as strong as defriending, but it definitely sends the message to be stingy with invites to Groups.

Brands and companies (like us!) will continue be promoted using Pages, and Groups created before this application revamp are still alive and active under the old system. Honestly, Groups is the best thing to hit Facebook since the ‘Detag’ feature. Use it wisely – this time, it’s actually possible!

What do you think of the new Facebook Groups?