The New Facebook Groups Features

Have you ever wanted to share more closely with specific people on Facebook?

If you’d like to easily group chat, group message, or share a video, photo or link with a specific group of your Facebook friends, you now can! Facebook announced last week the “New Groups”. You can create a group for anything that you want, including your family, closest friends, local business network group, volunteers, co-workers, clients or whomever you’d like to connect. The new features in groups makes it easier to connect and share! (Any groups previously created are called Old Groups. The Old Groups were primarily focused on activities, interests, schools, etc. The Old Groups will not be upgraded with the new features outlined below. However, any new groups created will include the new features.)

The New Facebook Groups

What are the biggest changes and features?

• Easily add your friends to automatically join the group. That means you can get added to groups that you don’t want to join. (Mark Zuckerberg was added to the NAMBLA group by a Facebook friend, although he quickly removed himself. If you get added to a group by someone, you can go into the group and remove yourself.)
• The groups can be open (public), closed or secret. With open groups, the group name, members and content are public and viewable to everyone on Facebook. Anyone can join open groups. Closed means the group name is searchable, the members are public and the content is private. Secret means the members and the content is secret (like the old private groups). For both the groups I’ve started (to date), I created them as secret to allow for privacy.
• You can use the group chat to chat with any and all members of a group at one time. This feature is great for group collaboration, announcements, meetings, etc.
• Members of a group can write and edit notes (similar to a wiki) called Docs that can be viewed and edited by all members of the group. 
• Every time something is posted in this group, you get notified. (That could get annoying.) However, there is a setting to manage this feature. Go into the group and then click “Edit Settings” in the top right corner. You’ll then be able to select the options of when you’ll get notified.

To get started and create your own groups, go to http://www.facebook.com/groups/. I created a group for our company GEMS Solutions to collaborate and I also created a group for family. (They are both "secret" - sorry you can't join!)

What new groups are you creating?

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