i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

On-Call Section

The article I am blogging about for my on-call section is entitled “Facebook Lets Users Interact in Small Groups,” available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/technology/07facebook.html.

·         What is being organized – things, information about things, information?  What is the scope and scale of the domain? 

Facebook “friends” are being organized into groups. 

Facebook suggests that Public Affiliations and causes continue to use Facebook Pages, rather than Groups, which is meant for small groups of people. [3] 

Old groups will still be available but will not have the features available that are available to new groups (such as docs). [3]

·         Why it is being organized – what functions or capabilities are being enabled, and for whom?  Are the uses and users known or unknown? Is the organization being done to achieve personal, social, or institutional goals? 

Facebook added this organizing capability to allow users to selectively share information with a small group of friends.   The new Groups design lets users create a shared space where they can quickly post photos, chat with other members who are online, and keep in touch when they're not on Facebook through a group email address. 

If you were in groups prior the unveiling of these new groups, you may say that Facebook already had a groups feature.  That is true, but users did not use the old groups much and complained that the old groups were hard to use “as a means of sharing personal information with a small group of their friends.   The new design offers a shared space where you can share personal information with a smaller subset of people with whom you interact on a more regular basis, like family, classmates or co-workers.”   [3]  These are the features of the new groups:

“Group Chat: You can chat with multiple other members of a group in real-time on Facebook Chat.

Docs: The new design has a shared notepad, which allows you to collectively write and edit notes with a group.

Mailing list-style notifications: Keep up-to-date with other group members through a variety of notification options, like subscribing to notifications or emails about any posts in the group, or any posts made by their friends.”  [3] 

Facebook is doing this, ostensibly, to please users which will in turn afford them, they hope, a stronger user base, ultimately suiting their institutional purposes.  In Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg’s own words, “The amount of sharing will go up massively and will be completely additive.[….]Knowing the groups you are part of helps us understand the people who are most important to you, and that can help us rank items in the news feed,” [1]  

As we’ve discussed in class, some system design choices have social impacts.  Critics of Groups dislike that “friends” are able to add users to groups without offering the user a choice of whether or not to opt-in to that group. 

Others have another bone to pick.  Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, for example, realizes users will be providing information to Facebook about “the basis of your online connections” and he worries about how Facebook will use that information. [1]

On a more optimistic note, some feel this level of granularity for whom you share things with is a good thing.  Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research, called Groups “a big step forward to allow Facebook to reflect the same social norms that we have in the real world.  In the real world, we don’t shout one thing to everyone that we know. With Groups, you have this opportunity to begin to control who hears what.”  I’m curious to see how strongly this feeling corresponds to the feelings of Facebook’s user base.

·         How much is it being organized – what is the extent or degree of description, classification, or relational structure being imposed? What principles guide and are embodied in the organization?

One user can only create and join up to 200 groups.  If you log in to your Facebook profile and click Groups from the left hand panel, you will see this message:  “With Facebook Groups, you can join and create up to 200 groups. Groups can be based around shared interests, activities, or anything you like.  The Groups application page displays your recently updated groups as well as groups your friends have joined recently.”  [2]  A caveat, however, shows up on the form to actually create a group, which reads, “Note: groups that attack a specific person or group of people (e.g. racist, sexist, or other hate groups) will not be tolerated. Creating such a group will result in the immediate termination of your Facebook account.”

When creating a group, a user must fill in 4 required fields and may optionally complete another 6 fields.  The required fields are Group Name, Group Description, Group Type and Sub-Group Type.  In other words, the group and sub-group types are using a controlled vocabulary.  The optional fields are Recent News, Office, Email, Website, Street, and City/Town.  The Group Type options are a drop-down list of 10 possible types.  Each group type has a different set of sub-group types.  For example, “Common Interest” group type, one of the sub-group types is “Families.”  A few other sub-groups types under “Common Interest” – just to give you a taste - are “Activities,” “Age,” ”Beauty,” etc – for a total of 23 possible sub-groups types in this group type.  The list of sub-types for “Common Interests” was one of the longest lists of sub-group types.  Other groups types have either the same number (23), or fewer, sub-types.

Upon creation of a group, a user is taken to a “Customize” page, which has additional group setup options.  All options have default values selected.  These are options set values such as who can write on the group wall, whether or not to show group events and the format of doing so, enabling/disabling of discussion boards, photos, videos, link (including who can post these items and how they are to be displayed), and, lastly, “access.”  “Access” defines the group as either open, closed or secret.  These “access” labels define who can join a group, the process for new members to join, which attributes of the group are visible to non-members, and whether or not the group will show in search results and in member user’s profiles.

In response to a concern that a group member could deliberately or inadvertently allow a stranger into a group, potentially exposing information in the group to an outsider, Zuckerberg responded that the system would police itself because everyone in the group would be notified when a new member joins and would flag someone who does not belong. [1]

·         When is it being organized – when it is created, at design time, or at runtime, just in case, just in time, all the time?

The new group Design just came into existence this month, so users were able to begin creating groups only recently.  Going forward, users can create groups at any time.  Members can be added/deleted at any time.

·         By whom (or by what computational processes) it is being organized – by individuals, by informal groups, by formal groups, by professionals, by automated methods?

Groups are created by individual Facebook users.  Once created, users can be added by the group creator (who is automatically an Admin), other Admins (if a group has more than one Admin), any member (for “open” access group).  In the case of “closed” access groups, members may suggest new members but those members must be approved by and Admin.  For “secret” access groups, a new member can be added by invitation only.  Note that a user herself or himself does not need to approve being added to a list by another person. 

A user can remove themselves from groups.  Admins can also delete members.  Admins can also block and unblock members, which I assume would be preferable to simply deleting the member, if you want to prevent that person from being re-added to the group again later. 

Groups themselves are automatically deleted once no members remain in it.

Overall, I though one other tidbit was interesting.  A Zuckerberg interview revealed that he thought tagging was the future of social networking, and that that belief was behind the New Groups design.  He seemed to also imply that lack of tagging was behind the failure of previous Facebook group/list attempts, which were never popular.  “It turns out the real solution is a lot simpler. Build an interface that makes it easy for users to tag people. This is a fundamental building block for social networking going forward.”  [4]  I thought it was interesting to hear how prominent a social networking industry executive thought tagging is going to be for the future.

1. New York Times article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/technology/07facebook.html

2. Facebook Groups page:  http://www.Facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2361831622&b

3. Facebook Help page on “New Groups design”: http://www.Facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2361831622&b

4. Forbes blog:  http://blogs.forbes.com/oliverchiang/2010/10/06/facebooks-fundamental-flaw-and-why-its-new-groups-misses-the-mark/