Facebook Group = Crowdsourcing + Seamless UX

From Jae Kim – Director of Social Media Products, FaceTime Communications

Unlike the millions of people who saw the Social Network last weekend, I happily stayed at home with my iPad Twitter app, catching up on my numerous Google Alerts on ‘social network’.  While I may have missed out on a piece of pop culture, thanks to Facebook’s surprise re-launch of Group, I’m right back in it.

I watched the live announcement via livestream on TechCrunch and replayed statements from Mark Zuckerberg (CEO) and Chris Cox (VP of Product) afterward.

For the expert Facebook users who have created Groups, today’s (new) Group announcement may sound like the functionality has just been repackaged. Other than the simpler UX and more features like group chat, wiki-style document sharing, and email integration, it essentially is.

(Old) Group can be created with members that you invite and can be used to represent context or place.  But the most interesting part of Mark and Chris’ presentation was the discussion on how to address context.

Problem

Facebook is trying to solve the problem of representing social context in the Groups function, as it exists in real life.  For example, conversations that people have in a bar with a bunch of friends are different from conversations that happen at the dinner table.  They not only vary by topic and language used, but also with whom they’re conversing, the relationship with that person, and the expected level of privacy.  As such, it is not surprising to see that people vary their behavior based on their environment.  The question then becomes “how do you translate that to online behavior?”

Each message exchanged on Facebook is randomized through the News Feed, stripping context from each message and mixing alcohol-fueled status updates from your friends with pictures from your most recent family get-together.  Without context and with everything mixed together, information can be misconstrued, leading some users to limit the amount of information they share.

Since communication is key to Facebook’s success, this is a huge challenge for the company to address.
 
Solution Idea: Crowdsourcing + Seamless User Experience Design

How Facebook is addressing the problem is interesting.  It’s clear that the company wants to create context-specific groups and provide an easy way to interact within the Group, but how do you build that?

We’ve seen how a unilateral system-wide change can backfire (see Google Buzz) and anything that toes the privacy line will attract public scrutiny.  Trying to solve this problem with complex algorithms not only takes a long time, but also runs the risk of returning false positives.  Imagine what would happened if Facebook incorrectly put you, your significant other, and your ex in the same group.  That would be enough to warrant a privacy violation, potentially leading to Facebook users defecting from the site.

Facebook, however, is using ‘social’ as a solution.  Web 2.0 has enabled users to act as a consumer as well as a content creator.  Social networks are just a platform for these interactions.  Without user traffic and user content, social networks will cease to exist.

The most brilliant part of yesterday’s announcement is the focus on the user experience (UX) design.  After acknowledging the problem, Facebook is focusing on creating a seamless UX so that anyone can create and use groups.  With the new Group redesign, a user can create a group as easily as he or she sends a group email.  With the new group features, users will also have a history of context and interactions, as well as group chat and basic document sharing.  Most notably, Facebook will get to identify small groups that you choose to interact with.

This social solution hinges on getting the user experience right.  Facebook has to win over users with ease of use and create such a seamless UX that the process is almost invisible to the user.  If users do indeed find the UX seamless and reap the many benefits offered by groups, the experience will help Facebook overcome any problems or challenges.

These Facebook UX changes will mean more groups being spontaneously created by users, and that presents unique challenges for keeping all the shared contents compliant.  The ideal compliance solution should not only discover all these groups that employees created but also make it easy to apply policies to manage them effectively.

Thankfully, the FaceTime Socialite team has been focusing on solving these problems for quite some time already.  Anticipating the explosion of smaller groups, the upcoming release of Socialite will include capabilities to discover and manage large numbers of Facebook groups and pages.

Thus, if you have a compliance requirement driven by the proliferation of social media sites, you should be thinking FaceTime, all the time.