What does FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that the social media platform will launch a new Groups feature, allowing for shared social space, mean for the future of the internet, social media and marketing?

The recent announcement that FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be holding a press conference at FaceBook’s head office in California at 10am local time yesterday was met with a wave of speculation and interest. For 60 days the entire company had been under lockdown working on a new project, and Zuckerberg’s forthcoming announcement had the entire social media industry guessing. What would FaceBook be announcing? Was it a partnership with Skype that would allow video chat through FaceBook? Was it a locations based application that would rival Foursquare? Or was it a complete overhaul of the social media platform’s design? So at 8pm South African time I found myself glued to my laptop, watching events unfold via a live video feed directly from Palo Alto…

Recent Developments…

Mark Zuckerberg opened the conference by stating that all the rumours and conjecture had been well off the mark… He stated that the project his team had been working on, and would be unveiling, was something more fundamental to the nature of social media. Zuck then began running through various recent developments and news. Facebook Places is already the biggest location app on the market and is growing fast. He also spoke about recent changes to Games and the continued rollout of Facebook Questions.

He then announced that his team had developed a system that would allow FaceBook users to download their FaceBook profiles, essentially offering them the opportunity to backup whatever they have posted to their accounts. His team had also streamlined the Dashboard for the Applications individuals use, but none of these were the major feature FaceBook had called the press conference to announce…

The Big Announcement: Giving You More Control

Zuckerberg then shifted gear, getting to the main reason for the announcement, a new feature targeting “the biggest problem in social networking.”

Privacy and sharing issues have always been a problem for FaceBook and its users. The privacy issues were dealt with ages ago, and everyone seems to be happy (or at least placated) with the current solution, but the issue of sharing is still a major area of contention. In real life people have different circles of friends and people that they interact with in specific places and ways, but on FB there is no way of differentiating these circles. An individual’s interaction with work friends is very different to that with their family, football buddies or the people they party with. But on FaceBook, all an individual’s friends are lumped together as one, and anything and everything shared or posted is shared with everyone…

Lists were introduced as a way of dealing with this, but they require a lot of work by individual users, and only 5% of FaceBook users have made use of lists. So essentially the photos of you drunk and falling over at last weekend’s Pearl Jam concert is being shared with everyone you are friends with on FaceBook – work colleagues, family, church friends and dozens of other people you may prefer didn’t see these photos… Concerns like these are limiting users’ social experience, and it is a major concern for FaceBook, so Zuck directed his team to find a solution to this problem, and this was the crux of yesterday’s announcement.

Zuck explained that the ideal situation would be to map real-world groups, get everyone to participate, and make it useful in a variety of contexts. Using FaceBook Photos as an example, Zuckerberg explained how most users don’t upload photos, but 95% of Facebook users are tagged in at least one photo because of social solutions. Friends tag friends…

Using this logic, Zuckerberg felt Facebook could make use of a social solution to build the best possible group communication tool and to make it easy for friends to set up. 5-10% of people create groups and do the work for their friends. As a result, everybody will benefit.

So this was the crux of the announcement: Facebook has created a shared space for communication, group chat and e-mail lists, called Groups. It’s not the same as the current Groups feature on Facebook, though.

Zuck then handed over to Justin Shafer, the product manager for Groups and he went into more detail. Unlike the old Groups, the new groups give every friend/member control over this shared space. Everyone can add mutual friends to the group, post content etc. The new solution also offers Group Chat, allowing members to chat with groups of friends. Essentially groups work like mailing lists – you can send and receive e-mail from your group and communicate with work friends or personal friends, etc. Thus the content you share within your network is not being shared across your entire FB friend list. “We think this is really going to change fundamentally how you use Facebook today,” said Shaffer.

Chris Cox then took the stage and began discussing social design. It’s about the approach the company is taking to how users manage the social graph. In a nutshell, FaceBook want to replicate real life social dynamics and structures as true to life as possible. Cox explained how the company thought about audience and space – the dinner table, the locker room and the bar are all different social spaces. Each has different groups, different languages, different histories, etc. Facebook wanted to build something that tapped into that.

In summary, the organizing principle of the announcement is giving users more control over their FaceBook experience…

The Future…

So looking forward, what does this new system bode for the future of social media? Will FaceBook users embrace the new Groups structure and utilise it as Zuck, Shafer and Cox envisage, or, like Lists, Groups and other failed solutions, will the new Groups simply dwindle into obscurity? Only time will tell, but given the amount of attention and hype FaceBook have generated with their “big secret announcement”, most of the civilised world should be aware of the new Groups structure within the next few days… Which was probably half the reason for creating the hype. For Groups to work, FaceBook need a massive uptake so the system quickly reaches a critical mass, becoming a ubiquitous part of the FB experience.

So if this happens, what will it mean for the future of social media, marketing and the internet? It’s Gorilla’s opinion that the new system could potentially reinvent the internet, building social networks within a social network. Which raises some interesting questions in terms of targeted marketing… Or perhaps this is even FaceBook’s true intention behind the groups. Marketing Nike football boots to every Group called “Football Buddies” or “Soccer Bros” will certainly be easier than the current system of algorithms, as will targeting specific members of a certain age demographic, gender, geographic location, and countless other criteria with marketing messages.

Similarly, this new development could negate the need for internal corporate communications… By forming groups on FaceBook, any company, from a small local start-up to a massive multinational, could communicate directly to everyone of its employees instantly – an almost indispensable tool. And one that makes companies that ban their employees from access to FaceBook look rather primitive.

The potential the new Group features offer opens a myriad of opportunities that we probably have not even conceived, and as it evolves (as social networking seems to do daily) the consequences for individuals, marketers and brands could be far reaching. Or, as the success of the entire system is based exclusively on the acceptance and implementation by Facebook users, perhaps it will simply fade into unused obscurity… Only time will tell.

From bricks to slick touch screens, mobile phones have developed a lot in the last 30 years… but what will happen in another 30 years? I maintain we’ll have chips implanted in our ears, but hey, may be I’ve been watching too much late night Star Trek. For a more realistic idea of where mobile phone design and technology is heading check this awesome article - 5 futuristic phone designs

Without wanting to offend the 0.0000000000036% of the world’s population that still believe in Creationism, I’m going to put it out there that I believe in Evolution. I believe that the human species as it is today wasn’t created by some all-powerful deity and dumped into a Garden Paradise approximately 4,500 years ago, but rather evolved and developed through generations of natural selection into the beings that we are today.
Furthermore, I’m going to state that in line with this notion, humans will continue to evolve and change, and thousands or even millions of years from now (if we survive that long without destroying our species or our planet) I believe we will be very different to the beings we are today…
So what will change? Will we have rubber bones? Diamond hard skin? Telepathic abilities? X-Ray vision and sonar capabilities? Will we be able to manipulate objects with our minds by influencing their basic structure at an atomic level? Or will we just spend more time listening to crap radio DJs like Gareth Cliff and watching mind-numbing reality TV shows?
Either way, click on this link to have your mind blown away. I think some of these cases offer a glimpse into how our species is evolving. Freaky? Yes. Incredible? Even more so. The future? Why not?