In my last post, I discussed Yahoo! Groups and what it does well – and not so well – in meeting the online needs of parenting groups, alumni associations, book clubs, discussion groups, and other organizations.  In this post, I examine how social networking sites – specifically Facebook – stack up against these requirements.

While not the first social network, Facebook has become the de facto standard for social networking with an amazing 350 million users. With features such as rich media sharing, activity feeds, and dynamic user profiles, Facebook is great for keeping up with old friends. As social networking has become more popular, users have come to expect these features in their online groups experience as well.  Given its overall strength in social networking, you might assume that we’d see a growing population of successful, high-functioning, real groups over on Facebook.  This turns out not to be the case.

Groups as profile labels

Let’s take a look at one of the most popular groups on Facebook.  It’s called “I Don’t Care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass”.  Yes, that’s its real name, and it has over 1.4 million members.  So what can we conclude from this?  Are there really over a million people with a strong desire to discuss their dislike for rubber shoes with holes in them?  Of course not.  Clearly, this is not a real group.  It lacks an overarching objective, an engaged member base, and active discussions.  In fact, the sole purpose of this group, it would seem, is to enable members to showcase their sense of humor to their friends by listing the group’s name as a “label” on their profiles and in their activity feeds.

Here’s another example.  The BASKETBALL group on Facebook has over 5,000 members.  About 10 posts per month appear in the discussion forums there.  The third most popular discussion is titled “I love basketball” and includes the postings “I love it too, basketball rocks!!!” and “basketball is the best sport ever.”  Compare this to Coaching Hoops, a typical basketball-related group on Yahoo! Groups.  The 500 members of Coaching Hoops include practicing high school and college coaches, and the group generates about 250 posts a month on topics such as shooting techniques and the most effective way to provide feedback to players.

Yahoo! Groups tend to be real, functioning groups with clear objectives and active discussions by passionate members. Facebook Groups, on the other hand, are often little more than “profile labels” — essentially badges that help us express who we are.

Friend-optimized

This is not to say that Facebook Groups are devoid of useful features.  Let’s have a closer look at what Facebook Groups does well and where it falls short in meeting the needs of real groups.

• Good promotion capabilities – Facebook’s ability to spread the word about your group via activity feeds is incredibly powerful.  Is there any other explanation for how a group about crocs has attracted 1.6 million members?  Clearly, if you want to grow your group membership, Facebook can help in a big way.
• Uncustomizable – Facebook has a clean-looking, nicely organized user interface.  But if you want to customize your group site on Facebook with your own color scheme, layout, URL, additional pages, and group-specific apps, then you will be disappointed.  In fact, Facebook does not offer groups a website, per se.  Rather, a group’s “site” on Facebook is really just a small collection of standard Facebook pages that have been repurposed with almost no changes for groups.
• No email interface – Facebook does not allow you to post content to your group or to receive group updates via email.  As we have seen, the highly accessible email interface of Yahoo! Groups is responsible, to a large extent, for the rich dialogue that exists in many groups there.
• Missing content types – Facebook Group members cannot post job openings, items for sale or free, or general announcements – all standard content types found in real online groups.
• Limited ability to discover new friends – Users often join groups in order to meet like-minded people.  But Facebook’s privacy options do not allow users to share profile information with fellow group members.  As a result, options for getting to know fellow group members are limited.

The bottom line is that Facebook is optimized for interacting with your friends, not your groups.  Facebook lacks many of the features required by parenting groups, alumni chapters, discussion groups and other “real” groups.  As a result, the activity level on Facebook Groups tends to be relatively low.  When a real group like an alumni chapter creates a Facebook Group, they tend to do so mainly for marketing purposes.

In my next post, I’ll discuss how the new Grouply offers the best features of traditional online groups like Yahoo! Groups and modern social networking sites like Facebook.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Company.