Facebook Friends Grouping
Published by Rodney Rumford October 1st, 2007 in Facebook, Facebook News.
Facebook Friends Grouping is coming sometime in the future to facebook. Sooner, rather than later in my estimation.
The ability to separate your friends has always been a challenge for me on facebook. To be able to put a specific circle of friends into a grouping make tremendous sense. Being able to then decide what information is available to them is a really important core functionality that facebook has needed for some time.
This is especially true as facebook has users from a younger demographic that might not want to share specific sets of information with their older work peers (party pics from the weekend, etc.). As the older demographic embraces facebook, this becomes a higher priority.
The official word from facebook: “Sort out your friends. We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.”
The timeline for the facebook friends grouping feature was not released. I would imagine this is a top priority. Knowing facebook; they will take take the appropriate time to make it easy to use and understand.
Friends Grouping was an inevitable feature that would be built by facebook.
Putting people into circles/silos and setting your association and what they can see was going to be built by facebook. This would not have worked well as an application. This is a fundamental feature that was needed on facebook; not an application.
Lesson: Don’t build applications that address what you see as fundamental core feature shortcomings of facebook. Facebook will eventually build out what is desired by the community. To think otherwise would be shortsighted .
There are at least 6 other core features that facebook should have but does not. I would not recommend creating an application that “fixes” these shortcomings. That is; unless you want to be squashed when facebook just slips it into the Tuesday night updates of the platform. 
Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook friends, friends grouping, facebook friends grouping
Once we have Friends Grouping, I’m abandoning LinkedIn. Am I majority or minority? I don’t need multiple social networks. I need 1 network with a decent grouping engine.
Rodney,
Great post as usual.
What are your list of 6 missing core features that app developers should reserve for Facebook?
WRT LinkedIn, I think it is dead. We only need one Social Network and all the sub-groups in my life can be managed via the feature you describe. If I were Linked-In, I would try to cut a merger deal with Facebook where I bring them all of my users in exchange for x% of their company. This would give Facebook a quick bump in business-oriented users (e.g., a few million LinkedIn users) and it would give LinkedIn shareholders a much more valuable currency than they have right now. LinkedIn should act quickly because their install base is a wasting asset. The one other play they have is to sell their business to Google so that this card goes in the hands of someone who would like to own and control as much of the facebook install base as possible.
Thanks,
Lee
Lee,
Thanks for the comments. I will not give my complete list of 6 core features that I think facebook will will eventually build out. The reason is this is this is pure speculation on my part.
I will say that I do believe they will add core messaging and calendering features. The 2 things are all central to how we communicate (low hanging fruit), so I think it is safe to say they will eventually add this.
I think you have an interesting point with Linked In as well. Interesting concept for how they could bring value to their shareholders. I suspect they would not do this… but that would be pure speculation. Linked In is a great service, but they have an uphill battle against facebook and keeping users. They are smart guys; so it will be interesting to see how they rise to the competition. Glad to see that they FINALLY added photos.
Rodney Rumford