While reading some articles online, I came across this one called ‘Facebook Launches Groups to Address Social Networking’s ‘Biggest Problem‘ by Irina Slutsky, from October 6, 2010.
This article caught my eye due to the fact that it was over Facebook. Facebook to me is something that’s great for networking and keeping in contact with friends and family, near and far. HOWEVER, I do believe that Facebook does take things to a new and not necessary extent.
So, as I was reading I began to find out quite a bit more about this “Facebook.” I discovered all of the different detailed features, Such as; groups, group chat, download your information, and dashboard.
These are just a part of several changes recently designed to give Facebook’s half-billion users more control over the information they share, including updates, messages and photos.
The new solutions to some problem that have formed are these so called “groups.” These groups allow users to depict what their friends or networks within their Facebook accounts can see. “Do I really want to annoy all my friends who don’t care about running about how I had an awesome jog this morning? How do I solve this?” Mr. Zuckerberg asked.
There are many different things to consider when creating groups. The groups can be public, closed or secret, and the users can even control the levels of privacy of the groups. Plus, users can have an email list, document sharing, and group chats. There is NO OFFICIAL LIMIT on the size of the group, but once a group gets beyond 250 people, the group gets turned off or is limited, automatically.
I believe these ties into the class I’m taking, quite a bit. The way Facebook has improved so much throughout the few years it has been in function, affects our generation (Gen Y) especially.
Group Chat has also recently been developed. The Vice President Product management, Chris Cox who has been involved in these projects said, “Targeted marketing is not possible for groups at this time, and may not be for a while.”
Mr. Zuckerberg also commented on top of this, saying that he is going to observe many different types of social interactions with the new Groups product. Especially due to the fact, that he can only see about 5% to 10% of Facebook users may actually use this Group Chat. He goes onto saying that this will hopefully pane out into covering much more than just 10%, but this could take months to do.
Yet another new feature is a tool called “Download Your Information.” This feature allows any user to download a file of everything they have ever uploaded, said, or RSVP’d to, on Facebook. This includes all wall messages and photos, too.
However, Seth Goldstein, StickyBitz founder, said “Facebook still keeps some of the most valuable information and activity users have “created” on Facebook — their relationships and interactions with other users.”
The final newer feature added to Facebook, recently launched, is a dashboard. This shows users all the applications they have downloaded/ allowed access to their profile and all information that application used.
Engineers also said, the new feature helps tremendously to make sure, that the applications are using the proper information and time. It also allows much greater visibility into what’s happening to each users’ information.
Brittshoe's Blog 
Leave a comment