Facebook’s new Groups are a FAIL

Facebook messed up again with their revised Groups. The privacy/control concerns of the design, which allow you to be added to groups by other people, are definitely one issue. That’s the not the crux of the problem, though. Facebook blew it because they failed to take into account the basics of human social interaction.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg said that Groups were meant to solve the problem of people wanting to share different information with different social circles. It’s a problem a lot of of us have had with Facebook: wanted to easily share information with only a subset of friends.  I even blogged about this in the Holes in Facebook’s Strategy.

Zuckerberg said that Lists weren’t the solution, as only 5% of people use them. That might be because the UI and functionality for Lists suck. Or maybe Zuckerberg is right that people just won’t take the time to create and manage them, even if it was easier.

Groups solve some of the problems that Lists have, making it easier to form and expand the membership and placing less of a creation burden on people. However, they don’t solve the problem of enabling people to share with different circles of friends.

I can’t share with Groups via my Facebook home page! 

This is the first problem and it’s really a stupid oversight. The home page is where users live. People rarely visit each other’s paes anymore. We expect the content to come to us via our feed and that we can share from our page. Yet to share with a group of friends, I have to go to the Group page.

If Facebook really wants us to use Groups, they need to make all of our Groups appear at the first level in Share dropdown (the lock icon). That way, if I have a group of professional contacts, I can share content with them right from my Home page. Groups would get a lot more use with just that simple change.

Facebook Groups require you to disclose the value of your social relationships

This is really the crux of the problem.  Lists were private. You created a list and put people in it, but nobody else knew what list they were in.

People don’t always perceive their relationships in the same way. That’s fine, because in our offline relationships, we don’t have to say “this person is a pretty close friend, but not a best friend, and this person is more of an acquaintance but they think of me as a closer friend.” 

Our relationships aren’t clean. There’s lots of overlap. There are differing perceptions. Our lives are full of  muddied relationships.

Facebook’s Groups give three options:

• Make the group completely open with anyone able to see who the members are and join
• Make it a closed (read “elite”) group. People can see that the group exists but only get in if the admin accepts them.
• Make it a secret group. Members can see each other, but nobody outside can see the group, the content, or who the members are.

Only option 1, a completely open Group, is a socially acceptable option. Let’s say that I want to create a group of my closest friends, or perhaps the business contacts that are most valuable to my business.  I’d make an “elite” (closed) Facebook Group, because only I can decide who is close or valuable enough to be added. The Group is discoverable, though. Let’s say one of my friends in the Group invites another friend, or that other friend just discovers the Group and asks to join. Now, I’m put in the position of excluding someone from the Group, and offending them or adding them to the Group and defeating its entire purpose.

These kinds of closed groups are ok on LinkedIn, because it’s a business network. Not on Facebook, where I’m dealing with personal relationships for the most part. In real life, people’s feelings are likley to get hurt when they are told they can’t be part of this or that group. It’s no different on Facebook.

Secret Facebook Groups are just as offensive. Let’s say that I choose to keep the Group secret. For example, I create a BFF Group in Facebook, containing my close friends and family. Unlike Lists, members of my BFF group can see who the other members are. The members will all know who I’ve designated my “BFFs” and who I haven’t.  

There is a very good possibility that non-members will find out about the group, through casual conversation. Maybe I post something to my BFF Group, and one of the members happens to mention the post to a mutual friend, assuming that person is in the Group. Now, this excluded friend is in the awkward and possibly hurtful situation of knowing that I don’t consider them a BFF.

Again, this goes against real-life social norms. It’s the equivalent of creating a secret club in real life.  With Lists, only the creator knows who is in the list. Once you make the members visible to one another, you’ve gone from a private tool that makes it easier to share private information to an online club. It’s different.

There are reasons why we don’t walk around explicitly stating the nature and closeness of our relationships: defining who is in which social group. There’s a reason that grown-ups rarely create secret clubs in real life. It’s a fast way to hurt feelings.

Facebook once again built features with their business goals in mind, without due consideration of their customer’s needs or goals. Facebook’s new Groups will be an effective tool for business, professional, or topical use, similar to LinkedIn groups.  Not for solving the sharing problem.

If Facebook had really looked at the problem Zuckerberg described, and spent their effort solely on building a solution for their users, that solution would look different. They were more concerned with building a solution that would aid their bottom line: give Facebook more information about our private relationships and the strength of them. In pursuit of profit, Facebook seems to have overlooked basic psychology and sociology. I say Groups are a FAIL.