Only your friends can add you into groups. You also don't have to participate in the group and they have made it very easy to leave. Jason is not a typical user and probably has a lot of crappy friends due to accepting requests from anyone. Adding an accept option would only add an unnecessary layer without changing much.
And how many of your "friends" are ACTUALLY your "friends"? As much as it was once fun to reconnect with somebody I shared an elementary-school classroom with, that's a connection I'll need to revisit if they're given the power to latch my profile onto whatever cause they want ... implying my support of that movement.
Facebook seems to have created Groups as their implementation of Twitter Lists. I can create a list and call it whatever I choose ... adding whomever I choose to it. But my sense is that the perception of a Facebook Group is different than a Twitter List because Facebook already has/had the concept of groups, and they DID require opt-in.
Do you remember what Zuckerberg said with this announcement? The 'pristine' social graph?
That's the whole point. He's trying to restore the meaningfulness of saying someone's a friend. Friends don't enroll friends in NAMBLA. I have to say, for the second day in a row I kind of agree with Zuckerberg. This isn't going to be popular, but it could actually lead to Facebook being less of a distraction and more of a genuine form of communication.
>"And how many of your "friends" are ACTUALLY your "friends"?"
By this token, I feel kind of sorry for those friends of mine who have gotten all MySpace about it and have 1,000 friends. They're the ones who are going to be most affected by this change. Perhaps the net effect will be that people will start unfriending more and honing their friend lists down to those who they actually know or who are not annoying. This would have an added benefit of increasing the quality of peoples' friend lists, or in other words, to more-tightly integrate users with their friends.
Yeah, this seems kind of silly. I think of facebook friends as people I might have met once, not people I would trust to add information to my profile.
So don't friend them on Facebook? No snark intended, I don't understand why that's always off the table in Facebook discussions.
I have 95 friends, they are all family or friends or coworkers. I previously had a lot more friends, but what's the point? I'm not friends with them, I don't care what's happening in their lives nor they in mine. I'm not even leaving room for the 'trust to add information to my profile argument'. Your perception of Facebook is kind of irrelevant, Facebook is giving you a platform that does one thing. You don't get the option to disagree with what it does based on a perception of what you think it does or should do -- aside from not engaging with their product or engaging in a way based on what the platform actually does.
Facebook is giving you a platform that does one thing
But that one thing keeps changing at the whim of Facebook. The service 'evolves' and expects the users to do the same.
As a user adjusts to the facebook eco-system, some arbitrary fundamental change comes out, making the user constantly reevaluating their 'friend' relationships.
> Adding an accept option would only add an unnecessary layer without changing much.
How about making a privacy option that allows you to set whether you automatically opt-in into groups or whether you want to be asked for a confirmation? I don't know about you, but I want to be in control of which groups I join, even if only my friends are able to force-join me.
Making public groups opt-in is probably a good idea. However opt-in wouldn't change much for private groups because no one else can see the private groups that you have been added to.
Except, given Facebook's history, I'm assuming we'll have to visit each and every one of those groups separately to unjoin them. That certainly would change my relationship to Facebook as a service if there is increased overhead in cleaning up the effects of unwanted features that are imposed on me.
Sorry, but I don't want my friends to be able to add me to groups without my permission anymore than I want people I don't even know to be able to do so. Whether somebody really thinks you'd like to be a part or decides to do so as a joke, it's still something I should have full control over.
I'm not outraged that people can do that with email because I know how email works at a technical level, and I'm comfortable trading that control for a standard decentralized communication medium that I understand the implications of. I do get annoyed when people actually do it, though, and that's why filters exist.
Facebook is different. They solely control the medium, and can actually fix it if people complain. Also, the implications are not as readily apparent as with email - this aspect was certainly not played up in the announcement yesterday - and posts like this help people understand exactly what's going on, so they can figure out how to use the system correctly.
And, really, if a feature isn't going to offer a meaningful improvement over email, why does it exist? "It's just like email" just tells me I'm going to keep using email.
Unlike mailing lists, groups on Facebook have hitherto been used mainly to _signal_ agreement with a particular sentiment or membership of a particular organisation.
Mailing lists with outrageous titles won't become directly linked to a prominent profile theoretically controlled by you or part of an "open graph" of your interests should Facebook ever decide to make them publically viewable (which their track record strongly suggests they might)
I left Facebook after their feature rollout at the beginning of the summer, so I can't check these things for myself. Do you really not receive notification when someone adds you to a group? If not, how is it easy to leave, given that you may not even know you're a member? And is there any way to know who added you, so that if someone keeps doing this to you, you'll know you need to tell them to stop or unfriend them?
Keep in mind that these "groups" are different from the previous version of groups that facebook use to have.
You get a notification when added to a group and can easily leave with one click. Groups are private by default which means that nobody outside of the group can see your private groups or any of the content.
This has made facebook a lot more interesting for me. Essentially it's a great way to have private discussions between my close group of friends without broadcasting to all my "friends".
My guess is Calacanis gets lots of notifications and he probably just missed it.
The group creator controls when the group is made public, and given Facebook's track record, you should probably assume anything you write in Facebook (except private messages) may eventually be public. Also I believe you can be "force joined" to non-private groups.
"identical amount of control that you're surrendering."
Not at all. If you send me an email without me asking, there is no public effect. One example of how this is bad with groups is what if I happen to be on a job search and someone adds me to the "I steal office supplies from my employer and sell them on eBay" group. Let's say a prospective employer is a friend of a FB friend of mine and looks at my profile and sees this. Job offer gone.
Counterpoint: you can remove yourself from a Facebook group, you can't remove yourself from a webpage or mailing list that someone else has control of. How's this so terrible again?
Facebook takes common words and redefines them -- so that on Facebook, the 'like' button mean 'subscribe to updates', not 'I think this is good'. Facebook makes more sense when you realise the work is misappropriated.
I wonder if we should just mentally translate the work 'Friend' on Facebook as 'person I allow to post about me on the internet'. Only friend that those people you trust to speak for you, and to you. You aren't declaring a public friendship, but delegating your privacy to them.
Only your friends can add you into groups. You also don't have to participate in the group and they have made it very easy to leave. Jason is not a typical user and probably has a lot of crappy friends due to accepting requests from anyone. Adding an accept option would only add an unnecessary layer without changing much.