Instant Reaction to New Facebook: You Can’t Have an Inclusive Group

Zuckerberg in 2007. From Wikimedia Commons.

UPDATED

In case you’ve been away from your computer for the last hour or so, you may have missed the reason Facebook was down for much of last night. Today, Facebook announced a new Groups feature that allows anyone to create groups of their friends to facilitate group collaboration and make it easier to target sharing at specific people. Read the official announcement on Facebook’s blog.

The details are still coming in, but I’m going to offer a really quick initial impression, because I’ve been looking a lot recently at the problem of communicating in groups on social networking sites.

First, Zuckerberg’s main assumption, that the biggest challenge in social networking is communicating in small groups, is correct. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et. al. are littered with comments irrelevant to my life made by people I barely know. This problem has to be solved.

Unfortunately, I think Facebook has made two fundamental mistakes in how they’ve chosen to solve it.

First, in his talk announcing the feature, Zuckerberg called this a natural “social solution” to the problem of sharing information in groups, because a small subset of people will build groups for everyone (the way it’s worked for tagging photos). Unfortunately, this very feature that makes photo tagging work makes groups useless, because the definition of a group is that it is exclusive. Online and off, groups work because the people in them recognize the need to separate that group from the rest of their lives, accept the other members in the group as part of that separation, and agree to be identified as part of the group. Without these three mental constructions, a group doesn’t work, and Facebook throws all of them away by letting anyone invite anyone without giving them a say and without letting them decide if the group’s existence is useful. This is going to create a proliferation of meaningless “groups” of which you are a part by proxy, don’t feel are necessary, and have people in them who you don’t feel should be there, which you will then have to go and unsubscribe from. Does anyone think this is going to be less work than lists would be?

But moreover, now apply these problems to public groups, and they multiply by thousands. But it gets even worse – the problem with public Facebook groups before today was that they weren’t based on anything useful, just the whim of the creator. So you had some useful groups for tiny communities that worked, but by and large, those big public groups we all joined were pathetic attempts just to get lots of people to join. In fact, Facebook had to invent Pages to solve this problem.

This brings me to the second problem. Public groups don’t work in the current social context. Why? Because we all have different interests that go beyond the scope of our Facebook friends. Being invited to a public group about computers, let’s say, by another friend who likes computers is great. Now what? I can discuss computers with a bunch of strangers, but I’m not going to friend any of them, because the point of Facebook (and especially these new groups) is precisely not to proliferate your connections beyond your ability to keep up with them. Moreover, unlike Twitter, there will still be no way to discuss computers with tech writers and celebrities because, again, the point of Facebook is to make meaningful one-on-one connections in a way that’s scary to public figures. So how do I have really good public discussions and collaborate with people on Facebook? Answer: I don’t. New public groups are going to be not just useless like they were before, but now also highly irritating for the reasons outlined above.

Facebook’s New Groups do have some good things going for it: the email and chat features are cool and will be useful for small groups (like study groups and classes) and probably corporations. But current Facebook groups worked for those anyway, this is just an upgrade. For everything else, this will just make Facebook that much more irritating.

UPDATE

So what will we end up getting beyond just a more annoying groups feature? In fact, upon further thought I think it’s even worse than that. Facebook’s New Groups feature is exactly what the photo tagging it’s based on is: a social labeling tool. The problem is that instead of labeling images in terms of their content, you’re now labeling people themselves in terms of anything you want, without their consent. What happens when you categorize or label a person in a way they don’t want to be labeled or categorized? You get all sorts of bad things – racism, sexism, all these nasty isms stem from this basic problem of categorization, but that’s content for another post. But take my word for it: social theorists are going to have a field day with this.

Okay, that’s my reaction. What’s your take on it? Is Facebook’s new grouping feature going to be useful for you or not? Will you use it or not? Is it as dangerous as I’ve made it out to be? Let me know in the comments.

About Gabe Stein

Gabe Stein (CAS '11), was the founding CTO and Associate Publisher of the Quad.

View all posts by Gabe Stein →

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