Facebook Groups gets a Send button to let Groups users share links, photos and other content from specific Websites with individual Facebook friends or Facebook Groups.
Facebook updated its Facebook Groups feature with a Send
button that lets users share content with a few people instead of an entire
group, adding missing granularity to the Web service.
Facebook
launched Groups last October to help the social network's users partition
groups of connections into friends, family and professional groups, among other
segments. The default setting for these groups of people is closed, which means
only members see what's going on in a group.
Since the launch, Facebook users have created more than 50
million Groups on Facebook, making the product a success.
"It's grown quickly because of its social design,"
said Elliot Lynde, an engineer on the Groups team. "Instead of making
everyone build and manage individual friend lists, one person can create a
group for their families and everyone in the family gets to use it."
To improve the service, Facebook seeded a Send button with some popular Websites to
let users share links, photos and other content with certain people. It's like
the Like button, only it can be limited to people in a Group or just some of
those people instead of all of a person's followers.
The Send button is available on more than
50 Websites, including
The Wall Street Journal,
The Washington Post, Orbitz
and Gilt Groupe, among others.
The button appears next to the Like button on participating
Websites. Users click it and can type the names of Facebook friends,
Facebook groups, or email addresses to whom they want to send the
content.
Facebook also integrated its Questions service to let
group members ask questions of and poll members within a group; the ability to
upload entire photo albums instead of just single pictures; and new membership
controls.
The controls will allow only Group hosts to pre-approve
all potential new members before they're added to the group. Previously, Facebook
fashioned the service so that any group member could add additional members.
The new features should help facilitate growth of the already
popular Groups even faster, particularly if the Send button follows the
Like button's trajectory; it's been deployed across 2.5 million
Websites.
Moreover, Facebook tends to endear itself to users by making
controls more granular, which is what the new membership controls
enable.
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