Facebook Overhauls Groups, A Social Solution To Create “A Pristine Graph” | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Overhauls Groups, A Social Solution To Create “A Pristine Graph”

techcrunch.com

34 pointsssclafani22 comments

I'm not buying the idea that a social graph has long term value. Relationships come and go. People die. People delete their Facebook accounts.

A social graph is just a digital incarnation of a yearbook. I don't recall yearbooks being valuable or useful...perhaps on a personal sentimental level.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical.

On the other hand, a Facebook user's list of groups that they've been active in within a month (or look at regularly) is probably very useful data.

You're right that yearbooks are not terribly useful on a day-to-day basis since it's static. However, I think Facebook's value comes from the organic nature of the site. You can update and craft your social graph to how you see yourself interacting with different groups of people at a given point in time. Of course your social graph will morph over time -- Facebook will hopefully make that as frictionless as possible. Facebook is a history of yearbooks.

It seems to me they could have supported lists better. I created a bunch of lists and try to make sure everyone is in the correct list, but most of my FB browsing is now through the iPhone app, which doesn't prompt me about this stuff. It always felt like they did just enough to have a decent implementation of it, but it never really got as integrated as it needed to be.

If it's a feature that isn't used as often as they hoped, it's likely because (a) their support for this feature is lacking, and (b) they haven't educated users about this feature.

Both of these points weren't surprising to me because I always believed that FB wants people to share as much about themselves to as many people as possible.

I think without Google Me, and perhaps frid.ge, they would never have reconsidered these concerns.

Now i finally can have a social network with my real close friends again inside facebook. Even reminds me of real social life. Does this imply facebook is even more integrated in our lifes when we clearly define different circles of trust?

For my uses it just lacks albums to be perfect.

Wait, so let me get this straight. Someone can add me to a group without my permission, and I suddenly start getting notifications about all the crap that goes on in that group? That sounds obnoxious even by facebook standards.

Think it needs to be a friend that adds you, and you can remove yourself and they can't re-add you.

The same friend could message you to death if they wanted to.

True, but they'd probably realise they were being annoying. I'm concerned that some of my less ... sophisticated friends might start adding me to every group they think is funny.

This is a good move on their part, as it was a big reason why people didn't like Facebook, why I didn't like FB. I am still not getting an account, but one obstacle has been removed.

Did this just destroy frid.ge?

IMHO frid.ge was always a bit questionable, I personally built a comparable product and quickly realized that there is a huge amount of momentum around getting people into a system that is pretty much devoid of people you know.

Groups (and Events) are two features that Facebook has left somewhat sidelined over other feed oriented features. If they can get the mojo right on Groups then whole classes of me-too features (like frid.ge) are somewhat suspect. The interesting question is can you have a group that's coworkers who aren't your Friends, thus digging into Yammer is a serious way.

If I ever happen to create groups(i am not sure yet) , I would prefer frid.ge

I would hope not. It's been one of the biggest complaints about facebook. If you're starting a social network I would hope you'd be prepared for competition from facebook.

Probably, along with a ton of other me-to niche social networks.

I'm not sure that it has. Facebook will move slowly to add features since Groups isn't their core offering (and probably never will be). I think it'd be quite easy to differentiate yourself from Facebook Groups if you focused on adding features Facebook will not or cannot add (such as file sharing, legal or otherwise).

"He says that 95 percent of users on Facebook in tagged in a photo"

They're tagged in photos because of those stupid apps that tag a photo with a bunch of random people from your friends list. I hated those things. I was constantly going and untagging myself from them.

Really? I've never seen one of those apps.

(I'm tagged in a bunch of photos because I go places and reflect photons.)

It's usually apps along the lines of "Born in July!" and "Names Starting with S" and "All Sagittarius Chicas!" and the like.

Odd, I've never seen those. While some of my friends (bless their hearts) are not quite au fait with the how-to-avoid-spamming-your-friends thing, I don't think any of 'em have ever added any apps quite that annoying.

Then again, I wasn't born in July, don't have a name starting with S, and am most definitely not a Saggitarius Chica, so maybe I'm just missing out.

Has anyone seen new API features for these new groups? I want to write a script to pull members from old groups (already possible), and then add them to one of these new groups. They seem more useful, but I don't want to deal with adding 100+ people to the new group.

Uh, yeah, so don't play around with this because everyone you add to a group gets notified, and it's kind of a pain to delete a group since you need to remove each person individually.

may be this is 'the facebook' killer.

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